alt Hacker NewsGah, the writing on this is so painful to read, it feels like this was most likely written by an LLM.
The writing style is so unclear, it's hard to figure out one of the key points: it mentions that Gemini doesn't use a distinct user-agent for its grounding. It doesn't mention whether it actually hit the endpoint during the test, though it kind of implies that with "Silence from Google is not evidence of no fetch." Uh, if there are no requests coming in live, that means no fetch, it's using a cache of your site.
It makes a difference whether it fetches a page live, or whether it's using a cached copy from a previous crawl; that tells you something about how up-to-date answers are going to be from people asking questions about your website from Gemini. But I guess the LLM writing this article just wanted to make things sound punchy an impressive, not actually communicate useful information.
Anyhow, LLM marketing spam from an LLM marketing spam company. Bleh.
Replies
I had to quit after a couple of paragraphs, I cant read such AI slop anymore :(
I did use AI to organize my ideas but I didn't think it was that bad, I'll modify and make it easier to read.
Anyway, in my test I saw zero requests from any Google UA after multiple Gemini and AI mode prompts that should have triggered grounding, so the working interpretation is that Gemini served from its own index/cache rather than doing a live provider-side fetch. The original phrasing was fuzzier than it should have been.
I haven't seen an LLM write this poorly yet (at least not passed off as good writing). This seems more like a person that used AI to organize things, but then didn't want it to seem like it was written by AI, so they rewrote it themselves. I think the problem here is just a genuinely unskilled author, and likely not a native English speaker judging by some of the awkward phrasing.