What happened

Gemini is Google’s AI chat assistant. When you ask it something, it often lists a few website links under its answer. People have recently noticed that the addresses of those links now end with a short extra tag, called a UTM. Its job is simple: when a customer clicks the link through to your website, it tells your traffic report “this one came from Gemini”.

Plenty of websites have a free analytics tool such as Google Analytics installed. It records how many people visit each day and where they came from, and turns that into reports; if your web agency sends you a monthly traffic report, the numbers usually come from a tool like this. Some of the customers Gemini sent you used to be impossible to pick out in those reports and could end up in the “direct” bucket, the one for visitors the report assumes typed your address in themselves. Now that the links carry tags, when a customer clicks one of them through to your site, the report can tell they came from Gemini.

The search industry publication Search Engine Journal reported this on 1 October, starting from a post by a Reddit user. John Mueller, who often answers site owners’ questions on Google’s behalf, replied in the thread “I see it too”. Beyond that, Google hasn’t made any announcement or published documentation on it. It hasn’t said when the tags are added or whether links in the mobile app carry them, and we couldn’t find any public information on Taiwan either. The quickest way to find out about your own site is to ask your web agency whether customers from Gemini have started showing up in your monthly report.

Why it matters to you

We looked at this problem back in August: the customers AI sends you are often credited to the wrong source. Gemini’s tags are good news, but your report only sees part of the picture.

Suppose you run a car servicing garage in Banqiao, and in one week three drivers turn up who all found you through AI. The first asks Gemini where in Banqiao to get an imported car serviced at a fair price; Gemini lists a few garages with links, he clicks yours, and the report records him as coming from Gemini. The second searches on Google, sees you in the AI Overview at the top (the answer Google’s AI writes above the search results, a separate product from the Gemini assistant) and clicks through, yet the report logs an ordinary Google search. The third reads about you in ChatGPT and phones to book without clicking anything, and the report has no record of him at all. All three came through AI; the report counts only the first as AI.

The second most likely counts as an ordinary search because AI Overview links carry no tag. Suff Digital, a marketing firm, ran a test in the US on 23 September: almost every link Gemini gave (97.3%) carried a tag naming gemini as the source, while not one link in Google’s AI Overviews carried any tag. It was a single company’s one-day test, so treat it as a pointer only, but at least in that test, two AI products from the same company, Google, worked differently.

We suspect that when many business owners first see a gemini row in their monthly report, the number will be small, and it will be easy to conclude that AI isn’t bringing in much business. That conclusion comes too early, because customers like the second and third drivers were never counted.

What to do about it

Start with how you read the report: don’t judge whether AI is bringing you customers by the size of the gemini row in your monthly report. All it can catch are customers who clicked a link through to your site; it misses everyone who reads an AI answer and decides there and then. Next time your web agency tells you how many customers AI brought in, remember those are only the ones the report could recognise; people who clicked through from an AI Overview, or read an AI answer and simply phoned, aren’t in there.

When the AI numbers in your report jump, you can’t tell why: did customers really increase or fall away, or did one of the AI companies quietly change how it tags links? Whether to tag, and when, is each company’s call, and they don’t necessarily announce it: Gemini’s tags, for instance, were spotted by users. So the report is only half the evidence; the other half means looking at the AI answers directly: for the questions your customers ask, does each AI mention you, and is it you they recommend?

Our managed GEO service deals with the half your reports can’t see, which is what AI says about you in its answers: our team fixes your site’s content, brings what other websites say about you into line, and regularly checks how each AI engine describes you. You just review the results.

Schedule a demo: a session with one of our consultants, who shows you everything live. We’ll ask Gemini the kind of questions your customers ask, the way they’d ask them, without naming your business. First we’ll see whether the answer mentions you, then open the links under it one by one to see whether any of them leads to your site. Last, we’ll go through your website’s GEO audit score together — geoweb.tw’s free audit, which checks how well AI can understand your site and scores it across 12 areas.

Further reading