Gemini is Google's AI assistant, woven into just about everything Google makes. You can throw text, images, audio, or video at it through one interface. The free version runs on Gemini Flash and slows down during busy periods. Pay $19.99/month for the Pro plan and you get Gemini 3 Pro, a Deep Research tool that pulls together multi-source reports, and AI features inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

That Pro plan also comes with 2TB of Google One storage. If you want the top tier, Ultra runs $249.99/month and adds video generation through Veo, the highest usage limits, and a YouTube Premium subscription bundled in. Enterprise customers on Workspace or Vertex AI get their own data handling terms and can pin their data to EU regions.

For people in the EU, things get tricky. Consumer plans store data in the US by default. Google can use your conversations to train future models unless you dig into settings and switch off activity tracking. Even after you do that, your chats stick around for at least 72 hours. Human reviewers at Google can look at conversation samples, and those reviewed chats are kept for up to three years.

Worth knowing

Google flipped Gemini on by default for Gmail, Chat, and Meet users in October 2025. Nobody was asked. Turning it off means hunting through settings menus that many users find confusing on purpose. The free API tier is completely blocked for apps that serve people in the EU or EEA because of data protection rules. There is also an ongoing class-action lawsuit in California over how Google collects data through Gemini. If you want an AI assistant that keeps your data in Europe by default, look at the alternatives on this page.