I gave Gemini my link. Sometimes it never opened it, searched the web instead, and missed

A score drop on a site that had not changed

In early October 2026 I was asking Gemini about my lab site. Each prompt was the URL of one of my pages plus a question in Japanese. Twelve questions, each asked twice: once in a conversational sentence, once as bare keywords, like 「URL 料金」 (the URL followed by the word for "pricing").

I ran one batch on 5 October and repeated it on 10 October. Same wording, same pages. The site had not changed at all: Gemini downloaded exactly the same number of bytes on both days. Yet the second batch got fewer answers right.

I assumed the grading was to blame. That was partly true: one answer in the first batch had been graded wrongly. The rest of the gap was not.

It never opened the page

I matched every session against my server log to see whether Gemini had actually fetched the page it was given.

• In 9 of 48 sessions there was no request for the page at all: 2 of 24 on 5 October, 7 of 24 on 10 October.
• Of those 9, none were correct.
• Of the 39 sessions where it did fetch the page, 37 were correct.
• 8 of the 9 skips came from the keyword-style prompts. The conversational ones skipped only once in 24.

When it skipped the page, Gemini searched the web for "Migurei". It pulled from other pages about us, such as a page on a group company's site and a press release. Those carry a company name, 株式会社ミグレイ, that appears nowhere on my page, so answers to "who runs this?" named the wrong company. In one session it said outright that it could not read the page and had searched Google for the company name. In another it reported a PERMISSION_DENIED error, while my server received no request.

What this means for you

With Gemini, a correct answer depends first on whether it opens your page at all, not only on what the page says. When it does not, whatever other sites say about you becomes the answer.

What you can do:

1. Check the pages outside your site that describe you: press releases, your parent or group company's pages, directory listings. The company name, address and prices there need to match your site.
2. Where they differ, fix what you can, and state the correct facts clearly on your own site.
3. When you test your site in Gemini, include terse keyword-style prompts. In my runs, that was the style most likely to make it skip the page.

How sure is this

This was measured in the lab, under narrow conditions: two batches, one account, one machine, the free version, a Vietnamese IP address. I did not record which Gemini model or mode answered. I do not know why it skipped the page. Without Cloudflare logs I cannot rule out a block at the edge, although Gemini's other requests at the same time were served normally. A skip rate going from 2 in 24 to 7 in 24 is not enough to call a trend. The full data is on the pw research pages.