Google today named thirteen third-party services that will become connected apps inside Gemini over the next few weeks, among them the AI notetaker Granola, which was sued on July 30, 2026 in a proposed class action alleging it records meetings without telling most participants. The announcement, made at Made by Google, extends a connection layer that Google's own help documentation already lists at 41 apps, the majority of them restricted to the United States and to English.

The post appeared on the News from Google blog under the byline of Mai Lowe, Group Product Manager for the Gemini App, and carries the date of August 12, 2026. It is short. Four category headings, thirteen named partners, one sentence about timing.

"Over the next few weeks, we're rolling out the ability to connect with tools across a variety of categories," the post states.

No launch date is fixed. No market list is given. No subscription tier is attached. For a company that has spent the past fifteen months wiring third-party services into every artificial intelligence surface it operates, the brevity is itself informative: the connection mechanism is now routine enough that Google publishes a partner list the way it once published a features changelog.

What sits underneath the list is less routine.

The thirteen partners, by category

Google grouped the additions into four buckets.

Productivity and creativity covers Granola, Otter.ai and Wix. The stated use cases are summarising meetings and editing a website. Two of the three are meeting-transcription products; the third is a website builder.

Local and entertainment covers Fever, GetYourGuide, Localiza, OpenTable in the United Kingdom, and Ticketmaster. Google describes the associated actions as booking local experiences, renting a car, reserving dinner and searching for event tickets. Fever and GetYourGuide sell experiences and tours. Localiza is a car rental operator.

Music covers iHeartRadio and Pandora, for discovering stations and streaming playlists.

Home, health and lifestyle covers Angi, Thumbtack and Zocdoc. Angi and Thumbtack are home-services marketplaces. Zocdoc handles healthcare appointment booking.

A summary of the same announcement circulated to press by Google grouped the two music services under local and entertainment rather than separating them, and rendered GetYourGuide as two words. The partner set is identical in both versions.

Five of the thirteen are not new to the connection layer at all. Wix, OpenTable, Ticketmaster, iHeartRadio and Zocdoc already appear in Google's published availability table for connected apps in Gemini. What today's post adds for those five is either wider reach or clearer positioning; what it adds for Granola, Otter.ai, Fever, GetYourGuide, Localiza, Pandora, Angi and Thumbtack is a first appearance. Those eight carry no documented availability entry yet.

What the availability table actually shows

Google maintains a separate help article, "Check the availability and requirements of Connected Apps in Gemini Apps," which functions as the operative document. It lists 41 connected apps and, for each, four fields: account type, age threshold, locations, languages, plus any required subscription. A fifth column records which Gemini surfaces and modes support the app.

The introductory note is blunt about inconsistency. Availability varies by location, language, device and Gemini application, and an app available on the Gemini mobile app might be absent from the web app at gemini.google.com, or the reverse.

Reading the table against the announcement produces a picture the announcement does not.

Account type is the hard gate

Most third-party connections require a personal Google Account and will not work with a work or school account. Wix, OpenTable, Ticketmaster, Zocdoc, Instacart, Zillow, Viator, Dropbox, Canva and Contacts all carry that restriction.

The exceptions are narrow. GitHub, Google Workspace and Google Classroom accept work or school accounts. So do the device-level connectors: Spotify, WhatsApp, Messages, Phone, YouTube Music, iHeartRadio, and the notes and calendar applications shipped by Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, OnePlus, vivo, HONOR, TECNO and Lenovo.

Two entries matter directly to advertisers. The Google Ads connected app, described as providing personalised business advice and access to content and tools, is restricted to personal Google Accounts, users aged 18 or over, English only, and Gemini chat only. The Google Business Profile connector carries the same personal-account restriction, is limited to the Gemini web app, and is unavailable across the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom.

That is the same constraint PPC Land documented on August 7, 2026, when Business Profile management in Gemini opened to multi-location accounts while remaining locked to personal Gmail logins. Agencies that run client work through Workspace identities sit outside both connectors.

Ages split at 13 and 18

The table applies two thresholds. Thirteen covers Canva, Google Home, Google Workspace, Instacart, iHeartRadio, Spotify, WhatsApp, Messages, Phone, Utilities and the device manufacturers' own applications. Eighteen covers Contacts, Dropbox, GitHub, Google Ads, Google Business Profile, Google Photos, Google Play, OpenTable, Samsung Gallery, Ticketmaster, Viator, Wix, Zillow and Zocdoc.

Transactional and identity-linked services cluster in the higher band. Media and device utilities cluster in the lower one.

Which apps reach the background agent

Three modes appear in the table: Gemini chat, Gemini Spark and Gemini Live. The distinction is not cosmetic. Spark is the background agent Google introduced at I/O 2026, capable of continuing work when a device is closed.

Ten entries currently support Spark: Canva, Contacts, Dropbox, Google Workspace, Instacart, OpenTable, Ticketmaster, Viator, Wix and Zillow. Zocdoc, by contrast, is chat only, as are Google Ads, Google Business Profile, Google Play, Google Photos, Samsung Gallery, WhatsApp and Google Classroom.

Ticketmaster and OpenTable sitting inside Spark means an event search or a restaurant reservation can be composed by an agent rather than a person in a session. Wix sitting inside Spark means the same for website layout work. Zocdoc's exclusion from Spark keeps healthcare booking in a supervised conversational turn.

Geography narrows sharply

Eight entries are United States only: Contacts, Dropbox, Instacart, Ticketmaster, Viator, Wix, Zillow and Zocdoc. OpenTable is United Kingdom and United States only, which is consistent with today's post specifying the UK. iHeartRadio runs in Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico and the United States.

English-only restrictions apply to Canva, Contacts, Dropbox, Google Ads, iHeartRadio, Instacart, OpenTable, Ticketmaster, Viator, Wix and Zocdoc. Lenovo Notes supports seven languages. Google Business Profile supports twelve, and excludes the EEA and the UK outright.

None of the 41 entries displays a subscription requirement, despite the table reserving a field for one.

Granola arrives twelve days after a class action

The productivity category carries an unresolved legal question that the announcement does not mention.

On July 30, 2026, Tarra Chamberlain filed a proposed class action against Granola, Inc. and Granola Labs Ltd. in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, docketed as Case No. 3:26-cv-07926-EMC. The complaint alleges Granola intercepts and records virtual and in-person conversations without disclosing its presence to most participants by default, then feeds those recordings into model training, also by default.

The filing asserts seven claims, including federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act violations and California Invasion of Privacy Act claims under penal code sections 631 and 632, which carry statutory damages of $5,000 per violation or three times actual damages. The complaint states the proposed nationwide class likely runs to millions of individuals.

Granola raised a $125 million Series C on March 25, 2026, reaching a valuation of roughly $1.5 billion, according to the complaint. Its listed customers include Thumbtack, which is also on today's Gemini partner list.

Twelve days separate the filing from Google's announcement. Neither the blog post nor the availability documentation addresses the litigation, and Granola does not yet appear in the availability table, so the account type, age, geography and mode restrictions that will govern the integration are not public. Otter.ai, the second transcription product named today, occupies the same product category.

For marketing and agency teams that have adopted AI notetakers inside client calls and pitch meetings, the practical question is whether a Gemini-mediated connection changes the disclosure posture at all, or simply adds a second interface to a recording flow already under challenge.

A sequence, not a single launch

Today's post is the sixth connected-app development Google has shipped since May.

At Google I/O on May 19, 2026, Gemini Spark launched as a background assistant built on Gemini 3.5 Flash with Model Context Protocol connections to Canva, OpenTable and Instacart, limited to the United States. On June 30, 2026, Google extended Spark to macOS in beta for Google AI Ultra subscribers and roughly doubled the roster with Dropbox and Zillow Rentals alongside Google Tasks and Keep.

On July 16, 2026, connected apps arrived inside AI Mode in Search with Instacart, Canva and YouTube Music, US and English only. That rollout introduced a behaviour worth noting here: according to Google's Search help documentation, the system may default to the last application a user relied on for a given task, with the user able to change it by naming another application.

On July 29, 2026, Google added long-press voice dictation and screen-aware editing to Gemini on macOS, English only. On July 30, 2026, Spark integrated with Chrome auto browse and reached 160 additional countries while remaining unavailable in the European Economic Area, Nigeria, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The agentic booking foundation predates all of it. Agentic booking for restaurants, events and local appointments expanded across the United States in November 2025, drawing on OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek, Booksy, Fresha and Vagaro, with United Kingdom restaurant booking following in April 2026. Several of the partners named today already sat inside Search's booking layer. What changes is the surface: the assistant application rather than the results page.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Distribution that cannot be bought

The Gemini application reached 950 million monthly active users in the second quarter of 2026, with daily actives tripling year over year and Gemini models processing roughly 22 billion tokens per minute across first-party interfaces. Google's own related-story panel on today's post carries the headline that more than one billion people now use the Gemini app every month.

That surface carries no advertising. Dan Taylor, Google's VP of global ads, stated in January 2026 that there were no plans for ads in the Gemini app, drawing a line between the assistant and AI Mode or AI Overviews, where formats were already being tested. Presence in the connected app list is therefore not a media placement. It is a partnership slot, allocated by Google, not auctioned.

For a category with a small number of national players, that allocation is consequential. Angi and Thumbtack in home services, Zocdoc in healthcare booking, Ticketmaster in events, GetYourGuide and Fever in experiences: each of these operates in a vertical where paid search has historically been the dominant acquisition channel and where the cost per lead is high. An assistant that routes the booking request directly into one named partner removes a click that used to be purchasable.

The default position

The AI Mode documentation establishes that Google may hold the last application used for a task as the standing choice. If comparable behaviour governs the Gemini application, the first service a user connects for restaurant reservations, ticket search or home-services requests occupies that slot until the user names an alternative.

That converts the initial connection event into the contested moment. Competitors absent from the list at rollout face a switching cost that did not exist when the same task ran through a search results page carrying multiple bidders.

Regional and account exclusions persist

The pattern across Google's 2026 connected-app deployments is consistent. Spark blocks the EEA and the UK. Business Profile in Gemini blocks the EEA and the UK. Connected apps in AI Mode launched US and English only. Eight of the 41 documented Gemini connectors are US only.

European marketing teams have watched this sequence for four months without gaining access to most of it. Nothing in today's post indicates a change, and the eight new partners without availability entries leave the question open until the table updates.

The account-type restriction compounds the geography problem for agencies specifically. A media buyer operating a client's Google Ads account through a Workspace identity cannot connect the Google Ads app to Gemini, because that connector accepts personal Google Accounts only. The same holds for Business Profile. Google has built an assistant layer over its advertising products that the professional operators of those products cannot reach with their working credentials.

What the announcement leaves open

Timing is stated as "over the next few weeks" with no completion date. Availability by market is unstated for eight of thirteen partners. Whether any of the new connections require a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription is unstated, though the existing table records no subscription requirement for any of its 41 entries.

Data handling receives one line in the help documentation, pointing to a separate article, plus the note that a Gemini response may contain embedded content from third-party connected apps. The unlinking path is documented: a user who links a third-party account to a Google Account can unlink it at any time.

What remains unaddressed is the question PPC Land raised when Business Profile connected to Gemini in June 2026, namely whether disconnecting an app removes the associated data from Gemini Apps Activity, or whether that requires a separate deletion. The Gemini application's data retention practices have carried scrutiny since Google confirmed in August 2025 that chats feed model training unless a user switches the setting off.

For an integration that now includes two meeting transcription products, one of them facing a wiretapping complaint, that gap is not a small one.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google, through a News from Google blog post credited to Mai Lowe, Group Product Manager for the Gemini App, naming thirteen third-party partners: Granola, Otter.ai, Wix, Fever, GetYourGuide, Localiza, OpenTable in the United Kingdom, Ticketmaster, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Angi, Thumbtack and Zocdoc.

What: An expansion of connected apps in Gemini across four categories, allowing meeting summarisation, website editing, experience and car rental booking, restaurant reservations, ticket search, music streaming, home-services matching and healthcare appointment booking to be initiated from inside the assistant. Google's separate availability documentation lists 41 connected apps in total, with account type, age, location, language and supported-mode restrictions varying by entry.

When: The announcement was made today, August 12, 2026, at Made by Google, with rollout stated as occurring over the following few weeks and no completion date given.

Where: Inside the Gemini web app at gemini.google.com and the Gemini mobile app, across chat, Spark and Live modes depending on the connector. Existing documented entries skew heavily toward the United States, with eight apps restricted to that market, OpenTable limited to the UK and US, and Google Business Profile excluded from the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom.

Why: Connected apps move the point at which a booking, reservation or service request originates from a search results page into the assistant interface, which carries no advertising and allocates partner slots rather than auctioning them. For advertisers in home services, healthcare booking, ticketing and travel experiences, that shift removes purchasable clicks from high-value verticals. For agencies, the requirement that the Google Ads and Business Profile connectors run on personal Google Accounts keeps professional operators outside the layer Google has built over its own advertising products.