Last week, I was buying a pair of shoes on my laptop, and rather than default to Grok Bot (connected to my Gmail), I went straight to Gmail to search for an old invoice.
If you are a Google AI Plus user, you can access Gemini in Gmail, which allows you to ask a natural language question in the search bar like “what is my shoe size” or “what is my frequent flyer number”, or more powerfully “which hotels have I stayed at in New York”.
Because Google is your email, it has a pretty comprehensive record of your life - every record of online transactions since the dawn of e-commerce. It is therefore very impressive that Google doesn’t scan your emails to better target ads to you. Google also does not use your emails to train their models.
To be fair, this is also the case in GrokBot and Muse’s privacy policies.
But Google has a number of advantages that are underweighted on X and in the tech community, where speed and technical benchmarks are lionised:
Google has more than 26 years of training consumers to reach for a Google search bar when they need information.
Google is arguably the most trusted tech brand in America. Nowhere is the disconnect between X and the real world more apparent than in the fact that Gemini is the only AI brand gaining trust in America, all the while taking heat for being the slowest and poorest model.
Let’s look at the statistics, which reveals Google’s lead across age groups and income brackets: