Test grounded answers, not model memory
Ask Gemini questions your buyers ask and watch which answers come back with source links attached. Grounded responses reflect what Google's index can retrieve right now; ungrounded ones reflect stale training data and are not a measurement of your site.
Align with Google's quality signals
Because grounding runs on Google's index, everything that helps classic ranking still applies: crawlability, page experience, helpful-content signals, and clear authorship. There is no separate Gemini ranking factor to chase.
Optimize for passage-level summarization
AI Overviews stitch together short spans from several pages. Sections of 80-150 words with a declarative first sentence get reused far more often than long flowing prose, because they can be quoted whole without editing.
Feed the knowledge layer
Organization schema, consistent NAP data, an authoritative About page, and Wikipedia-grade third-party references improve how confidently Google's entity systems recognize you - and recognized entities get named in answers rather than described anonymously.
Watch the Search Console signature
AI Overview exposure usually appears as rising impressions with falling CTR on informational queries. Treat that as a prompt to add commercial depth - comparisons, pricing, tooling - to the pages absorbing it, rather than as a pure loss.
Keep freshness visible
Dated review notes, updated benchmarks, and accurate dateModified values matter more in grounded generation than in classic ranking, because the system prefers to summarize the source it can prove is current.