The free audit asks Perplexity a handful of questions a buyer of yours might ask, and shows whether it cites you. It does not ask Gemini: that is measured in the product, on Growth and Scale.
In the Gemini API, the model looks at the prompt, decides whether a Google Search can improve the answer, and if so writes and runs one or more search queries itself.
Grounded API answers link segments of the text to source URLs, and return search suggestions for the app to display.
In the Gemini app, sources appear under a Sources button at the bottom of a response or inline, when available. Google notes that not every response includes sources.
Google-Extended is the robots.txt token that controls whether Google may use your content to train future Gemini models and to ground answers in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI.
Google-Extended does not affect inclusion in Google Search, and has no crawler of its own: Google's existing crawlers do the fetching.
How we ask
We put each tracked question to Gemini through DataForSEO's LLM Responses API, using the gemini-2.5-flash model with web search on, and read the sources the answer cites. That is the engine's API, not a signed-in session in the Gemini app, so an answer can differ from the one a person sees.
How often
Every 14 days per question, spread across that window so a domain's checks do not all land on one day. On trial accounts, scheduled checks pause after 14 days without a sign-in and resume on the next visit.
Each check records
| Plan | Tracked questions per domain | Checks a month, all engines |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | 100 | 1,200 |
| Scale | 100 | 4,000 |
Past the monthly budget, the questions checked longest ago go first and the rest wait for the next cycle.
Vendor sources checked 2026-09-24