Google Search History Now Can Be Used To Enhance Gemini AI Answers

Buttons + invented Tiger Text + Google Gemini introduces an experimental search feature powered by AI that uses your Search history, making it increasingly difficult for users to differentiate between organic Search and AI assistants

Google announced an update for its Gemini personal AI assistant that allows the assistant to make its responses more personalized and anticipatory of user needs making it feel even more like a person assistant rather than a tool. Some of the new Gemini features include brainstorming travel suggestions and finding personalized recommendations for users.

The new feature first comes to desktop, then mobile apps.

Gemini With Personalization

Google introduced a new generation of Gemini that tailors its responses to a user’s particular interests. It does so by leveraging their search history which helps Gemini generate answers with greater contextual relevance and more personalization. To further personalization, Google plans to connect other Google apps and services — others mentioned include Photos and Images.

Google explained:

“But over the next few months, Gemini will become familiar with you, connecting with other Google apps and services like Photos and YouTube. “This will allow Gemini to provide more tailored insights, as it will have a wider scope of your actions and preferences and can return true relevancy on its responses to you.”

How Personalization Works

Users also can offer personal information, including their dietary preferences or their partner’s names, for a better degree of customization in replies that feel tailored to the user. Power users can even enable Gemini to access prior chats, making responses even more relevant.

Google’s access to integrated search history and data from other apps might just give it such a toehold that competing apps such as ChatGPT cannot overcome.

Personalization Is Opt-In

Here are 4 things to know about personalization within Gemini:

• Personalization is now something you must opt into, marked “experimental” at that.
• If Users opt to use Personalisation, they must do so from the model drop-down menu.
• Before using search history and other Google services and apps for personalization, Gemini requests permission to connect.
• Users also have the option to turn off or disconnect the feature.

That means that millions of Gemini users won’t suddenly start getting information from a contextual AI assistant rather than search, as the amount of query volume will not start to shift over. But it does mean that the door for that to happen is there and the next step is for Google users to open it

It means millions of Gemini users are not suddenly going to start receiving more and more information from a contextual AI assistant, rather than search. But it does mean there is a door to that happening, and it is now up to Google users to open it

What Publishers Need To Know

This update further incorporates distance within a link networkbetween traditional Search and the Assistant which will make information in all forms increasingly accessible to the search just by the suggestion of input which publishers and SEOs ought to be sufficiently threatened by to study to see how to react.

Concerns over privacy issues might prevent Google from making personalization an opt-out feature. And personalization is still an experimental feature, so it is an opt-in from a drop-down menu. But at some point once it’s mature it does not seem unreasonable to think that Google could start nudging users to adopt it.

While this is an experimental feature, it may be of interest to publishers and SEOs (this links to a Founder document that was written in 2020) to know how this could affect them; specifically, whether or not personalized tracking is possible here.

Gemini referral traffic — or will that be obfuscated for privacy reasons? Will Gemini answers decrease clickthroughs to publishers’ websites?