Gemini will see your search history (but it won’t judge you)

Google has been working to squeeze AI into more corners of users’ lives. It has a pretty consistent presence across the company’s products. Well, Gemini can now access your search history to better understand your query.

This feature is part of a broader push to help Gemini get more familiar with you. Gemini will connect to more of your Google apps and services to gather more information about you. It will use it to give more relevant responses. This is a way to help Gemini deliver a more agentic experience.

Gemini will be able to look through your search history

It’s important to note that Gemini will access your Google search history specifically. It won’t access your browser history.

In any case, this is something that might make people worry just a bit. To make Gemini more of a close companion, Google will let it see what you searched for in the past.

Are you on a health kick, and you spent the past couple of days searching for ANYTHING with avocado? Well, if you ask Gemini for a healthy recipe, the thinking is that it will look through your history and find that you’ve been searching for meals with avocado. So, rather than needing to tell Gemini what kind of ingredients you want, Gemini will know.

This could be extremely helpful in many scenarios. We typically ask Google for just about everything, so there’s no telling how our search history defines us. Giving Gemini access to this information could boost the overall experience for many people.

Gemini won’t access your search history for every query. It will only do so if it thinks that it will be helpful. It most likely won’t access it if you’re asking a general question. However, if you’re looking for a vacation spot or for fashion advice, then it’ll most likely thumb through your searches.

This is a pretty smart tool

Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model powers this feature. This is one of the company’s newest and most powerful models on the market. So, we know that it will be able to look at your history and make informed decisions about what’s relevant and what isn’t.

If you don’t want Gemini finding out about your late night internet rabbit holes into haunted hospitals (or whatever people use Google for), you can disable this function. However, how you disable this feature might upset some people.

You’d expect a feature like this to have a manual opt-in option that stops it BEFORE it accesses your history. However, it looks like you will only be able to disable it AFTER it accesses your history.

When you get a response back, you’ll see a banner letting you know how Gemini got its answer and whether it accessed your search history. You’ll see a Clear banner button. Follow that link to disconnect Gemini from your history.