In mid-October we wrote that the links in Gemini’s answers had started carrying a source tag, so traffic reports could pick out some of the customers who came from Gemini. It now looks as if the tag lasted only about three weeks: it stopped at the end of September, before our article came out. It wasn’t until the end of October that a consultant posted his site records and asked publicly whether others were seeing the same, and Google hasn’t put out an announcement or explained it publicly.

When customers ask AI in a phone app and then tap through to your website, whether your report can recognise them mostly comes down to whether the AI company is willing to put that tag on its links, and if it stops, nobody will tell you. So if you want to know whether Gemini is actually sending you customers, the report alone is no longer enough. A report can only count, after the fact, how many people turned up; whether a customer comes at all is settled when Gemini answers them, so what you need to look at is whether its answer mentions you and how it describes you.

What happened

The tag is added to the very end of a link’s address and is written for your traffic report: it reads utm_source=gemini, meaning this customer came from Gemini.

The person who put his site records out and raised it publicly is a search consultant, Natzir Turrado. For the sites he tracks, he logged how many visitors arrived carrying the tag, day by day. By his records, the tag started appearing in early September, grew for the next three weeks, then vanished overnight on 29 September and has barely been seen since. At the end of October he asked on social media whether anyone else was seeing the same thing, and within days Search Engine Roundtable, a publication that covers the search industry, reported it, and the reporter said the Gemini links he was seeing himself no longer carried the tag either.

As for Google, there was no announcement when the tag appeared or when it stopped, and as of 6 November, when we wrote this, it hasn’t explained why or said whether the tag will come back. So for now, the evidence is this consultant’s records, the press reports and our own website’s records.

Why it matters to you

Losing the tag doesn’t mean every customer Gemini sends you gets miscounted. When someone clicks a link in Gemini on the web on a computer, the browser tells your website by itself that the visitor came from Gemini, tag or no tag, so by this consultant’s records those customers are still recognised by reports, and their numbers have held steady throughout. Our own website, geoweb.tw, shows the same: since October, visitors from Gemini on the web can still be identified as coming from Gemini in our records, but none of them have had the tag in their address.

The ones affected are customers using the phone app. This consultant’s records show that most people who click through from the Gemini app on iPhone and Android can’t be recognised by reports and end up under “direct”, in the same bucket as people who typed your address in themselves. On iPhone, the Gemini app opens your page inside its own screen and doesn’t tell your website where the visitor came from.

Suppose you run a wedding photography studio in Chiayi. One evening, an engaged couple opens the Gemini app on their phone and asks which studio in Chiayi takes the most natural-looking wedding photos. The answer mentions you and includes a link to your website; they tap through, go through your whole portfolio, and phone the next day to book. But in your report, the couple has been filed under direct, and you can’t tell Gemini sent them.

So in your monthly report, the customers counted as coming from Gemini are now probably little more than the ones who clicked through on a computer; almost none of those who asked Gemini in the phone app are counted. And plenty of people use Gemini: in a survey Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission published at the end of October, over a third of people who had used AI tools said Gemini was the one they mainly used. However small the number in your report, it isn’t everyone who found you on Gemini.

What to do about it

You should. The customers the report misses can’t be added back from the report, though; what you can work on is how Gemini talks about you when it answers customers. For that, it goes on what it can read: your website, and how other websites, maps and platforms of all kinds describe you.

If you’d like to see how Gemini talks about you right now, you can book a demo with one of our consultants. The customers your report can’t see this time are exactly the ones in the Gemini app, so start from the Gemini app in a demo: the consultant opens the app there and then and, the way that couple asked about wedding photos, asks the kind of thing your customers usually ask, then looks at whether the answer mentions you and what it says about you. In the same session you’ll also go through your website’s GEO audit score: geoweb.tw’s free website audit, which looks at how well AI can understand your site across 12 areas.

After that, if you’d like to hand it to us for the long run, we have a service called managed GEO that looks after how AI describes you, and it works on two fronts. One is watching: every so often we take the things your customers would ask, put them to Gemini, ChatGPT and other leading AI engines, and keep every answer. That record is our own and doesn’t rely on tags, so however Google changes its tagging in future, it isn’t affected. The other is fixing: our team improves your website’s content and brings what other websites say about you, such as your address and opening hours, into line with your own site, so that when AI describes you, it’s working from the right information.

Further reading