Gemini Gems vs Custom GPTs for SaaS marketing: what each actually does, whether either improves AI citations, and when building one is worth your team's time.
A support lead pastes you a stat: more than 3 million Custom GPTs got built in the two months after OpenAI's GPT Store launched. A marketer on the same team just noticed Gemini Gems went free and asks whether your SaaS should have one too. The honest answer to "Gemini Gems vs Custom GPTs" isn't which platform wins. It's whether either one moves the needle on the AI citations your team is actually chasing this year. It doesn't, and understanding why changes what you build first.
Both products are real and both have a legitimate, narrow job: onboarding, support deflection, internal workflows. Neither is a citation strategy, because neither lives on the open web your blog does. This post walks through what each actually is, what the newest citation research says earns a mention in ChatGPT instead, and a straight decision framework for whether building one is worth your team's time this quarter.
A Custom GPT and a Gemini Gem do the same basic job: they wrap a general-purpose chatbot in your instructions, your uploaded files, and sometimes your own tools, so a user gets a narrower, more consistent assistant instead of a blank prompt box. The difference is which company built it, and how public it can get.
OpenAI opened the GPT Store on January 10, 2024, letting anyone browse and use publicly shared Custom GPTs built by other users (SEO.ai). Uptake was fast: more than 3 million Custom GPTs existed within about two months of launch. What's less discussed is how few of those ever went public. Only around 159,000 are listed in the store today, roughly 5% of everything created, which tells you most Custom GPTs are private tools built for a single workflow, not public-facing products.
A Custom GPT can hold custom instructions, a knowledge base of uploaded files, and API actions that call out to real software, which is more capability than a Gem currently ships with. That capability is also why the ones that do go public, like Canva's Magic Design GPT, tend to be built by product teams with an actual integration to show, not a marketing team looking for a quick SEO win.
Google rolled out Gems to Google Workspace customers in August 2024, initially gated behind a paid Gemini Business, Enterprise, Education, or Education Premium add-on (Google Workspace Updates). That paywall lasted about seven months. Starting in March 2025, Google made Gems free for all Gemini app users, first on the web and then across Android and iOS (9to5Google). A Gem is lighter-weight than a Custom GPT: a name, a set of standing instructions, and optionally some reference files, without the action-calling layer OpenAI ships. Google gives every user five built-in Gems to start from (Brainstormer, Career Guide, Coding Partner, Learning Coach, and Writing Editor) before you build your own.
Here's the direct answer: it improves engagement with people who are already inside ChatGPT or Gemini, and it does nothing for whether your brand gets cited when someone asks an AI answer engine a question elsewhere. Those are different jobs, and conflating them is the mistake worth avoiding.
A Custom GPT or Gem earns its keep when the user is already inside the platform and the task is narrow and repeatable: walking a new user through setup, answering the same 20 support questions without a ticket, or giving your own team a Gem tuned to your style guide for internal drafts. Canva built a Custom GPT that puts its Magic Design tool inside ChatGPT itself, meeting users where they already are instead of asking them to open a new tab. Anwar Haneef, Canva's Head of Ecosystem, described the results plainly: "We are seeing some uptake in new users coming in from this platform, but it's still early, and the learnings from engaging with this customer base outweigh the benefits of user acquisition at this point" (HubSpot). That's a company with real product-market fit inside ChatGPT, months in, still calling the payoff early and framing it as learning, not growth.
A GPT Store page is a real, indexable web page, and that's exactly the problem for a brand that wants credit for it. Those pages collectively drive an estimated 6.1 million monthly visits from Google search, but every one of those visits, and any authority Google assigns to that traffic, accrues to chatgpt.com, OpenAI's domain, not yours (SEO.ai). You built the assistant. OpenAI owns the page rank.
Gemini Gems are walled off even further. Since a September 18, 2025 update, a Gem built on a Google Workspace account can be shared with specific people, groups, or your whole organization, using the same permission model as Google Drive, and Gems built on certain file types like code or email can't be shared at all (Google Workspace Updates). While researching this piece, we checked Google's own Gem-sharing help documentation and found one nuance worth being precise about: personal, non-Workspace Gemini accounts do list a "Public" visibility option, described as letting anyone "search on Google and get access to your Gem" without signing in. That page also notes work or school accounts may not see the option at all, which covers the tier most businesses actually build under, and there's no evidence of an indexed Gem directory anywhere close to what OpenAI built with the GPT Store. Practically, for a SaaS team, a Gem is closer to a shared Google Doc than a web page.
If the goal is AI citations, the lever that moves them isn't a branded assistant, it's backlink authority to pages you actually own. A November 2025 SE Ranking study of 129,000 domains and 216,524 pages across 20 niches found referring-domain count was the strongest single predictor of getting cited by ChatGPT. Sites with 2,500 or fewer referring domains averaged 1.6 to 1.8 citations. That climbed to 2.9 to 5.6 average citations once a domain crossed 32,000 referring domains, and up to 8.4 above 350,000 (SE Ranking). Neither a Custom GPT page on chatgpt.com nor a private Gem adds a single referring domain to your site. Building one is time spent on a different problem than the one the citation data says to solve. We go deeper on the full engine-by-engine version of that data in how to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
A branded assistant is a destination for people who already found you. Your blog, your docs, and your structured data are what get you found in the first place, on Google and inside AI answers alike, and no amount of Gem or GPT polish substitutes for that.
This is the part worth sitting with if a Custom GPT looks like an SEO shortcut: it isn't one, structurally. Every ranking signal a GPT Store page earns, backlinks, click-through, dwell time, is a signal OpenAI's domain gets credit for. Your own site sees none of it. If your actual goal is topical authority Google and AI answer engines both recognize, that authority has to live on pages under your own domain, which is the whole premise behind answer engine optimization: structuring the content you own so it gets cited, rather than routing effort through a platform that keeps the credit.
Compare that to a Gem, and the gap widens rather than closes. A GPT Store page at least exists as a crawlable URL that shows up in Google search results, even if the authority lands on the wrong domain. A Gem on a Workspace account doesn't get that far: no public store, no browsable directory, and sharing that's scoped to the people and groups you explicitly grant access to. There is nothing here for an AI answer engine to crawl, cite, or link to, because there's no public page to find. If citations are the goal, a Gem doesn't even get you the consolation prize a GPT Store listing does.
Given all of that, the decision isn't "which platform is better." It's whether your team's GEO fundamentals are already in place, because a branded assistant is worth building only after the foundation that actually earns citations is already doing its job.
Build a Custom GPT or Gem when three things are true at once: your support or onboarding volume is genuinely high enough that deflecting even a slice of it saves real time, your users are already spending time inside ChatGPT or Gemini day to day, and your blog is already fact-checked, interlinked, and earning the referring domains that actually move ChatGPT citation counts. Under those conditions, a branded assistant is a legitimate engagement layer on top of a citation strategy that's already working, the same way Canva treats its Magic Design GPT as a second front, not a replacement for canva.com's own SEO.
Skip it, for now, if your blog posts aren't sourced, your internal linking is thin, or you don't have a system that fact-checks claims before they ship. Every hour spent tuning a Gem's instructions is an hour not spent on the referring-domain math that the SE Ranking data says actually gets you cited. That's also the harder, slower work, which is exactly why Lyra exists: she finds the topic, writes it in your blog's own voice, fact-checks every claim against a real source, and opens a pull request instead of publishing something no one reviewed. If your GEO fundamentals aren't built yet, that's the higher-leverage place to spend the time a Custom GPT would otherwise cost you. See the plans if you want the specifics, or talk to the founder if you'd rather walk through your setup first.
A Custom GPT or Gemini Gem can deflect support tickets, but it can't earn your domain a single backlink, and Lyra is built for the part that actually does: fact-checked, interlinked posts that show up when someone asks an AI answer engine a question.
FAQ
A Custom GPT is OpenAI's version, built inside ChatGPT with custom instructions, uploaded files, and optional actions, available since the GPT Store launched on January 10, 2024. A Gemini Gem is Google's equivalent inside the Gemini app, free for all users since March 2025. Both create a narrow, instruction-tuned assistant, and neither publishes a page on your own domain.
Not directly. A November 2025 SE Ranking study of 129,000 domains found ChatGPT citation counts nearly double once a domain crosses 32,000 referring domains, and the mechanism behind that is backlinks to crawlable pages you own. A Custom GPT's page lives on chatgpt.com, and a Gemini Gem built on a business account has no public listing at all, so neither adds a crawlable page or a backlink to your own domain.
Only in a narrow, unconfirmed case. Google's own sharing documentation lists a 'Public' visibility option for personal Gemini accounts, described as searchable without signing in, but that option does not appear for Google Workspace accounts, the tier most businesses actually build under. There is also no public Gem directory equivalent to the GPT Store.
For a narrow use case, yes: onboarding walkthroughs, support deflection, or internal workflows where users are already inside ChatGPT. Canva's Head of Ecosystem said uptake through its Magic Design Custom GPT was real but early, and the company was prioritizing what it learned about user behavior over pure acquisition numbers. Treat it as an engagement tool, not a source of new organic citations.
After. A Gem or Custom GPT only reaches people already inside ChatGPT or Gemini. It does nothing for the backlinks, crawlable pages, and referring-domain authority that get a brand cited in AI answers elsewhere. Get the blog's fact-checking and internal linking solid first, then treat a branded assistant as a bonus, not a substitute.
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