Gemini SEO Singapore: Get Your Business Named (October 2026)

Gemini names the businesses it finds when it searches Google's index and Google Maps for the question, so a business that's weak in both rarely makes the list. Google calls the search step grounding. Its crawler documentation describes grounding as giving the model content from the Google Search index at the moment someone asks, and it names the Gemini app as one of the products that does this.

Google's developer documentation for the same models spells out the steps. The model decides whether a search would improve the answer. If it would, it writes one or more queries, reads the results and builds an answer with citations. If not, it answers from what it learned in training, and a business that opened after the model was trained won't be in that memory.

Questions about places get a second source. Google's Gemini help page on places says Gemini uses public information from Google Maps to find businesses and to look up a place's address, website, rating and opening hours. So "who does corporate websites in Singapore" is mostly a web question, while "physio near Bishan" is mostly a Maps question. Most service businesses need to be strong in both.

When a Gemini answer has sources, a Sources button under it opens a panel of the links behind it, according to Gemini's help pages, so you can see what it used.

People in Singapore can reach Gemini through the Gemini app, Gemini in Chrome, AI Mode in Google Search and Ask Maps in Google Maps, and all four are live here now.

• The Gemini app. Google's help pages list Singapore for the mobile app, which can act as the phone's assistant on Android, and for the web app, whose 70-plus languages include English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
• Gemini in Chrome. The sidebar assistant came to Singapore in April 2026 on desktop and iPhone, TechCrunch reported.
• AI Mode. The AI tab in Google Search reached Singapore in English in August 2025 (Tech Coffee House covered the launch), during Google's rollout to more than 180 countries. Google's AI Mode help page now lists Singapore with English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil, and Google says AI Mode has passed one billion monthly users.
• Ask Maps. Gemini inside Google Maps arrived in Singapore in August 2026. Marketing-Interactive's launch report used the example of halal eateries open past 10pm, the kind of question a local business wants to be the answer to.

The three you'll meet most often work differently, and that changes how you measure them.

AI Overviews has the largest audience of the three, which Google puts at more than 2.5 billion monthly users. The rest of this post is about the Gemini app and AI Mode.

When someone asks Gemini about a place, Gemini reads Google Maps, and what Google Maps knows about your business comes mostly from your Google Business Profile.

The places help page lists what Gemini can pull from Maps, which is the address, a description, the website, the rating and the opening hours. With permission it also uses the phone's location, so "near me" means wherever the person is standing. These place features currently need the question in English, from a signed-in adult on a personal Google account.

The Maps data Google offers developers building on Gemini covers more than 250 million places, with addresses, hours, ratings and reviews. Google doesn't publish how Gemini ranks places, so the closest guide is how Google ranks them in Maps.

Google's local ranking help page names three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. Prominence includes how many reviews you have and how good they are, and the page says there's no way to pay for a better local ranking. Google's guide to generative AI features adds that Business Profiles can make your services visible in AI responses.

AI shortlists are much tighter than the map pack. SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index covered more than 350,000 locations of 2,751 multi-location brands, and SOCi reports that Gemini recommended a brand's locations 11% of the time, against 36% of the time in Google's local three-pack. A clinic that scrapes into the map pack can still miss the Gemini answer.

For a Singapore business, the profile work that helps most is unglamorous:

• A primary category that matches how customers ask, such as "physiotherapy clinic" instead of "wellness centre".
• Services listed one by one, in the words customers use.
• Hours kept current, including public holidays.
• Replies to reviews, which Google's ranking page recommends.
• A website link to the page that answers the question, not only your homepage.

My Google Business Profile guide for Singapore covers the setup step by step, and the map side is the core of my local SEO work.

Blocking Google-Extended in robots.txt stops Google using your pages to ground answers in the Gemini app, though it has no effect on your Google Search rankings.

Google's crawler documentation says the Google-Extended token controls two things: whether your content trains future Gemini models, and whether it's used for grounding in the Gemini app and in Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI. The same page says Google-Extended doesn't affect inclusion in Google Search and isn't used as a ranking signal.

Google-Extended has no user agent of its own. Google crawls with its usual crawlers and reads the token as a permission, so the crawler that matters is Googlebot. If Googlebot can't fetch and index a page, that page isn't in the index Gemini searches.

If your site sits behind Cloudflare, check its managed robots.txt setting. Cloudflare's documentation shows it blocking Google-Extended alongside GPTBot, ClaudeBot and other AI crawlers, so switching it on to stop AI training also takes your pages out of Gemini's grounding. I check every client site for this, along with access for the other AI crawlers.

AI Overviews and AI Mode have a separate switch. Since 31 August 2026, every site has a Search generative AI setting in Search Console, set to Include by default. Exclude hides your links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features, and Google says the setting isn't a ranking signal anywhere else in Search. The help page doesn't list the Gemini app, and it leaves training to Google-Extended.

Gemini needs pages that Google has indexed and can show with a snippet, written in plain text that answers the customer's question in the first few lines.

Google's AI features documentation says a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no extra technical requirements. The Gemini app grounds in the same index, so I hold pages to the same bar for all three. Google's optimisation guide also asks for first-hand experience or a view of your own, over commodity content that restates what's already published.

For a physio clinic in Bishan, that means a page saying which injuries you treat, who treats them and what qualifications they hold, how a first session runs, roughly what it costs in SGD if you publish prices, and which MRT exit is closest. Copy like "quality care for the whole family" gives Gemini nothing to repeat.

Your own website seems to count for more with Gemini than with ChatGPT. Yext's analysis of 6.8 million AI citations from July and August 2025 found that 52.1% of Gemini's citations came from websites, while ChatGPT drew 48.7% of its citations from listings. Yext sells listings management, so read it with that in mind. I've written up how ChatGPT picks its sources separately.

Structured data helps Google read a page, though Google says its AI features need no special schema, and any markup must match the visible text. LocalBusiness markup tells Google your address and opening hours in a form it can't misread, and my schema markup guide covers how to add it.

Last, keep your business name, address and phone number identical on your site, your Business Profile and any Singapore directory that lists you. When one clinic has two phone numbers online, Google has to guess which one is right.

AI Mode splits a question into subtopics and searches each one at the same time, so a page that also answers the follow-up questions has more chances of being pulled in.

Google's AI Mode help page calls this query fan-out, and its optimisation guide gives the example of a lawn weed question that spawns a search for the best lawn herbicides. Ask AI Mode "who does corporate websites in Singapore" and the fan-out could reach for prices, timelines, portfolios and who maintains the site afterwards. A page that covers each of those in a plain section gives AI Mode several reasons to cite it.

Google draws a line here. The same guide warns against making a separate page for each query variation or fan-out query to game the results, and ties that to its scaled content abuse policy. One strong page per service will serve you better than twenty thin ones.

AI Mode also cites different pages from AI Overviews. Ahrefs compared 540,000 pairs of US answers from September 2025 and found the two cited the same URLs only 13.7% of the time. AI Mode answers ran about four times longer and named 3.3 people or brands on average, against 1.3 in AI Overviews, so AI Mode has more room for a business name.

Search Console reports AI Mode and AI Overviews but not the Gemini app, so Gemini app visits have to be found in Google Analytics instead.

Google's AI features documentation says traffic from AI Mode and AI Overviews is counted in the Performance report under the Web search type. Since 31 August 2026, every site has also had a Generative AI performance report covering those two features. It shows impressions only, by page, country, date and device, and it may not appear for a site with too few AI impressions.

For the Gemini app, look in Google Analytics 4. Google's default channel definitions include an AI Assistant channel for visitors from ChatGPT, Gemini and similar assistants, with AI Overviews and AI Mode excluded. That channel counts clicks. It can't show the times Gemini named you and the person phoned you instead of clicking.

Be careful with tools that promise more. Google's optimisation guide says no third-party tool has access to Google's internal metrics on its AI features.

Every month I run the same set of customer questions through Gemini, alongside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and note which businesses each one names.

In month one, the client and I pick the questions together, worded the way their customers would actually ask them. For a physio clinic in Bishan, that might be "physio near Bishan for knee pain" or "sports massage in Bishan open on Sunday". The set stays the same after that, so one month's answers can be compared with the next.

With Gemini, two habits keep the check honest. I name the neighbourhood in the question instead of writing "near me", so the answer doesn't depend on where I happen to be sitting. And I open the Sources panel, because the pages Gemini leaned on tell us what to fix.

One answer proves little, because AI answers move between runs. Ahrefs notes that in its earlier research, 45% of AI Overview citations changed from one generation of an answer to the next. When a business is named three months in a row, I treat it as real.

The record also shows who Gemini names instead of you, and comparing their profiles and pages with yours is where each month's work list comes from. That work is part of my SEO retainer, not a separate AI product. Perplexity reads different sources again, and my Perplexity post covers what it favours.

You can check your own Gemini visibility in an afternoon with five customer questions, your phone, and access to your Search Console and Google Analytics accounts.

1. Write five questions the way a customer would say them, with your service and your area, such as "aircon servicing in Tampines".
2. Ask the Gemini app on your phone, signed in, in English. Write down every business it names, in order, and open Sources to see which pages it used.
3. Ask the same questions in AI Mode and compare. If a competitor appears in both and you appear in neither, read their Business Profile and service page first.
4. Open your Google Business Profile next to your website. The name, category, hours, phone number and address should match exactly.
5. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see "User-agent: Google-Extended" followed by "Disallow: /", Gemini can't ground its answers in your pages. On Cloudflare, check the managed robots.txt setting too.
6. In Search Console, open Settings, then Search generative AI, and confirm it says Include. Then open the Generative AI performance report if your site has one.
7. In Google Analytics 4, check the AI Assistant channel for visits from Gemini.

Keep the questions and the names in a spreadsheet, and run them again next month with exactly the same wording.

The usual shortcuts sold as Gemini or AI SEO either do nothing for Google or break its policies, and Google has listed several of them in writing.

• llms.txt and other AI files. Google's optimisation guide says Google Search doesn't use llms.txt or AI text files. One won't hurt you with other engines, but it won't move Gemini.
• Chunking pages or rewriting them in "AI language". The same guide says there's no need for either, because Google's systems understand synonyms and intent.
• Star markup on your own testimonials. Google's review snippet rules make pages ineligible for review stars when the business controls the reviews about itself.
• Bought or rewarded Google reviews. The Google Maps content policy bans paid reviews and incentives such as discounts or free services, and it bans asking only your happy customers.
• Planting mentions of yourself. Google's guide says inauthentic mentions help less than people expect, because its spam systems are built to catch manipulation.
• Blocking Google-Extended "to be safe". It keeps your pages out of Gemini app answers, which is the opposite of what you want from SEO.