When people think about how AI describes their business, they usually picture ChatGPT’s chat box, or the AI-written summary at the top of Google’s search results. But even once a customer has made it onto your own website, AI is still right beside them. Chrome now has a Gemini icon in the top right corner, and one click gets it to summarise the page for them, or tell them straight out how you charge. It’s working from your pages, and what it says is AI describing you as well.

Say a mother in Toufen, in Miaoli, is looking for a driving school for her son, who has just turned 18. One evening she opens three driving schools’ websites on her computer, and rather than scroll through each one, she clicks Gemini and asks it to put them side by side in a table: fees, whether there are weekday evening lessons, and whether the shuttle bus comes out near her home. The table may well be what she reads most carefully. If yours were one of those schools, the row about you would be something Gemini wrote after reading your website.

Gemini in Chrome arrived in Taiwan in April

In April Google announced it was launching Gemini built into Chrome in Taiwan. Click the Gemini icon in the top right corner of Chrome and a side panel opens where you can talk to it directly. It can summarise a long page, and answer questions like “How can I make this recipe vegan?”, an example Google gives itself. With several tabs open, you can also ask it to pull the information from different websites into a table for comparison. Google said it would come first to Chrome on computers and iOS.

StatCounter’s figures show that about 60% of web browsing traffic in Taiwan in October came through Chrome. That’s a share of traffic; we couldn’t find any figures for how many people in Taiwan have actually clicked that icon. What we do know is that the feature is there, right next to your website on your customers’ own screens.

Google isn’t the only one putting AI into the browser: Microsoft’s Edge browser has its own AI assistant, Copilot, in the top right corner too, and it can read the tabs a user has open and answer from them. And on 28 October Google’s CEO said the kind of AI features that get things done for people will be extended to Chrome as well, though he didn’t say when.

It reads the page in front of the customer

Google’s help page puts it plainly: by default, Gemini in Chrome responds using the content of the current tab. Whichever page of your site the customer opens it on, what that page says is most of what it has to work with.

Customers reading your site themselves scroll down, click through to your price list, and pick up the phone if something isn’t clear. Asking Gemini, they can read just the few lines it puts together. If your prices are on another page that the customer hasn’t opened, Gemini doesn’t have that page’s text, and the price it gives may not be the one you wrote. And whatever those few lines leave out, the customer won’t necessarily go looking for. In effect your website has a new reader, and once it’s done reading, it has to speak for you.

Try it once yourself; three minutes will tell you

You can try this today. Open your website in Chrome on a computer, click Gemini in the top right, and ask two or three of the things customers ask most, like how much it costs, whether you’re open on Saturdays or how to book, then see whether it gets them right. Use Chrome signed in to your Google account; it won’t open in an Incognito window. Google also says the feature is being rolled out gradually, so if the icon hasn’t appeared in your Chrome yet, that’s nothing unusual.

Where it gets something wrong or can’t answer, our judgement is that it’s usually because that point isn’t spelled out clearly on your site. Seeing how it answers will usually show you what needs filling in.

The conversation happens in the customer’s browser

But the questions you ask yourself are only ever your questions. A customer’s conversation with Gemini doesn’t go through your website. As we understand it, the most your website’s own records will show is that someone visited the page; what they asked and how Gemini answered, you won’t see, and we haven’t found anywhere Google lets site owners see it.

Customers won’t ask the way you do, either. One stops on your price list and asks whether the price includes tax; another, on the page about getting to you, asks whether it’s easy to park nearby. Any page on your site can be asked about, and everyone phrases things their own way. Clicking around now and then only shows you a small slice of that. What it takes is asking about your site page by page every so often, in the words customers actually use, seeing which pages the AI answers badly, and rewriting those pages.

That only works if it keeps happening, and it’s the kind of work our managed GEO service does: at regular intervals we put the questions customers ask to ChatGPT, Gemini and other leading AI engines to see how they describe you and whether anything has changed since last time. Where your pages aren’t clear, we rewrite them, and we bring what other websites say about you into line. You just review the results.

Make a note of the questions you asked that Gemini got wrong. Arrange a demo with one of our consultants and watch AI answer them live: the consultant takes those questions, along with the things customers in your line of business usually ask, puts them to ChatGPT and Gemini there and then, and you see whether they describe you the same way. In the same session the consultant also shows you your website’s GEO audit score. The audit is free and looks at whether AI can understand your website across 12 dimensions.

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