Gemini Gems Are Going Away: What Happens on November 17

On 17 November 2026, Gemini Gems on personal Google accounts stop working. Google's help centre puts it plainly: Gems "transition to skills and become read only. You can still access your Gems, but can't use or edit them, or create new ones." A month later, on 17 December, Google removes them.

Google will turn each Gem into a skill for you, so for a lot of people this will pass with a banner and nothing else. For others it's a bigger change than the word "transition" suggests. A skill needs a setting a Gem only needed for Drive files, Keep Activity, the one that lets Google learn from your chats. It holds less, it can't use Canvas, Deep Research or video, and you can't share it yet. And if you use Gemini through a work account, none of this happens until March.

I read Google's Gemini help centre, its Workspace admin guide and its privacy hub on 8 November 2026. Here's what changes, what to save while you still can, and where else a Gem can go.

The Short Answer

Account	What happens to Gems
Personal Google account, 18 or over	Read-only from 17 November 2026. Removed on 17 December 2026. Turned into skills automatically.
Google Workspace business, enterprise, non-profit	Gems move to Settings on 17 November and keep working. They stop no sooner than 1 March 2027.
Google Workspace education	They stop no sooner than 1 June 2027
Gems by Google Labs and Opal	Both go away in November too

If you rely on a Gem, do two things before 17 November. Copy its instructions somewhere you control. Download its knowledge files, especially audio, video, zip files and old .doc, .xls and .ppt files, which won't move to the skill, and the largest files if they add up to more than 100 MB, because Google drops those first. Then decide whether you're happy to switch Keep Activity on, since skills don't work without it.

What Happens on November 17

From that date a personal account's Gems are frozen. You can open them and read them. You can't chat with them, change them or make new ones. Google's transition FAQ says it will "automatically recreate your Gems as skills" when Gems go away, and on 17 December the Gems themselves are removed: "You'll no longer be able to access your Gems."

Google's own explanation is that skills are more flexible. A Gem was its own chat, which you opened from the sidebar. A skill is a set of instructions that works inside any chat. You call it by typing / and its name (Google says @ is coming), Gemini can apply it on its own when your prompt matches, and you can stack several in one conversation. You can keep up to 100 skills active.

That's a real improvement for some uses. Google's pitch is that you no longer switch to a separate Gem chat, so you can apply your brand voice to a draft already in progress. It's also a different habit. Your skill chats don't get their own list the way a Gem's did. They sit in the main chat history with everything else.

What Moves to a Skill, and What Doesn't

Google lists what carries over and what doesn't in its transition FAQ and its skills article.

Part of your Gem	As a skill
Name, description and instructions	Copied across
Knowledge files	Copied, up to 100 MB in total. Over that, "we automatically remove the largest files first."
Audio, video, zip and other archives, .doc, .xls, .ppt, GitHub files	Not copied. Download them from the Gem before 17 December.
Gem tools: Create video, Create music, Canvas, Deep Research, Guided Learning	"Most default tools that are available in Gems do not work with skills" yet
Sharing	Not available yet. Google says it's coming "in the coming weeks."
Its own chat list	Gone. Skill chats show in your main history.
Who can use it	Personal accounts of people 18 and over now; Workspace accounts as skills roll out there
Keep Activity	Required. Gems needed it only for Drive files.

The tools row matters if your Gem made things. A Gem you used to draft slide outlines in Canvas, or to turn product photos into short clips, will come out the other side as a skill that can't make the video or open Canvas, for now. Google promises Gem features "in the coming weeks," but the ones it names are sharing and Drive files, not Canvas or Deep Research.

The Keep Activity catch

This is the row I'd read twice. Google's skills article lists three requirements to create or use a skill: be 18 or over, be signed in, and "Have Keep Activity on." Gems needed Keep Activity only to pull files from Google Drive.

Keep Activity is Gemini's history setting. It's on by default for adults. When it's on, Google uses your activity to improve its services, including training its AI models. A subset of chats is read by human reviewers, and Google's privacy hub says reviewed chats "are retained for up to three years," even if you delete your activity.

Plenty of people switched it off for exactly that reason. If you're one of them, Google says it will convert your Gems for you, but it doesn't say what happens when Keep Activity is off, and you can't use a skill until you switch it back on. So the choice is yours to make before 17 November: accept the training to keep using your Gem's instructions inside Gemini, or move the instructions somewhere else.

Where skills work

Google's skills article says that, for now, skills are only available in the Gemini mobile app, the Gemini app on Mac and the Gemini web app. Its Gems article says a Gem you create "will appear in the Gemini mobile app and the Gemini side panel in Google Workspace." The side panel isn't on the skills list, so if you used a Gem from the side panel in Gmail or Docs, expect to lose that for now.

If You Use Gemini Through Work

Google Workspace accounts run on a slower clock, and Google's admin guide is the place to read it. On 17 November, Gems on business accounts move into Settings in the Gemini app, and "all users can continue to create, edit, and use them." The cut-off for business, enterprise and non-profit accounts is "no sooner than March 1, 2027." Education accounts follow no sooner than 1 June 2027.

When that day comes, two things happen. Remaining Gems become skills, but as inactive drafts, and their creator has to review and switch each one on before anyone can use it. And Workspace Studio flows with an Ask a Gem step stop working. You already can't add that step to new flows. Separately, Google says skills don't currently sync between the Gemini app and Workspace apps, so a Gem used in Workspace has to be rebuilt by hand in Workspace Studio.

If a small team runs on Workspace Business Starter or Standard, you have until March. Use the time to rebuild the two or three Gems people actually use, rather than waiting for the automatic drafts.

Before November 17: A Checklist

1. Open the Gems list in the Gemini sidebar, which sits under More if you don't see it, and note the ones you use.
2. For each one, select Edit and copy the name, description and instructions into a document.
3. Download its knowledge files one at a time: open each file and select Download. Prioritise audio, video, archives, old Office files and anything that takes the Gem over 100 MB.
4. Decide on Keep Activity. Skills need it on.
5. If you want to test early, recreate one Gem as a skill yourself: Customize, then Skills, then Create manually, and paste in the details. Google's article walks through adding the files.
6. After the switch, open the Skills page, check each converted skill is switched on, and run a prompt you used to send the Gem.
7. For a Gem someone shared with you, open it and copy the instructions yourself, since anyone with access can see them, or ask the owner for its files. Google's transition page doesn't say what happens to shared Gems, and skills can't be shared yet.

You can download files any time before 17 December. You can use the Gem as it is until 17 November.

Where Else a Gem Can Live

Here's the good news in Google's change. Skills use the SKILL.md format, a plain Markdown file with a short header, and Google's Workspace guide says it "lets users create, customize, and transfer instructions across tools without platform lock-in." Once your Gem is a skill, you can download it from the Skills page as a .zip with its SKILL.md inside, and take it elsewhere.

Claude. Anthropic's skills are on every plan, Free included, with code execution switched on, and you add one by uploading a .zip from Customize, then Skills. Claude wants the skill in a folder inside the zip, so you may need to re-zip Gemini's download. For a Gem that leaned on documents, a Claude project holds files of up to 30 MB each, and free accounts get up to five projects.

ChatGPT. Not a safe harbour this month. OpenAI is retiring its own version of Gems, custom GPTs, on 11 December. What happens to custom GPTs covers that move and the options inside ChatGPT.

izzedo chat. It reads the same file, and it runs Gemini's models without Keep Activity. More on that below.

Where izzedo Fits

If you want Gemini's models without Gemini's history setting, izzedo chat has Gemini 3.8 Flash on its free plan, and Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini 4 Argon on the $6 Hobby plan. izzedo reaches them through Google's paid Gemini API, and Google's terms for paid API use say it "doesn't use your prompts... or responses to improve our products." There's no Keep Activity switch to think about.

Your Gem's instructions come with you. izzedo's skill editor has a Paste SKILL.md tab, on every plan, the free one included. Paste in the file from your downloaded Gemini skill, or the instructions you copied from the Gem, and save it to a project or as a global skill that works in every conversation. Like Gemini, izzedo loads a skill when your request matches its description. The Gem's files go in the project's knowledge base, which starts on the Hobby plan.

To test it, I wrote the kind of Gem a small candle shop might use for its listings, as a SKILL.md: open with two scent notes, the facts on their own line, a fixed care tip, 60 to 80 words, and ask rather than guess when a detail is missing. I pasted it into a project and asked for a listing on Gemini 3.8 Flash, a free-plan model. It loaded the skill and wrote a 65-word description ending with the care tip, word for word. It also put the facts in a sentence rather than on their own line, and described the candle as "hand-poured," which I hadn't told it.

Then I switched to Claude Haiku 5.5, also free, and asked for a second candle without giving a burn time. Haiku asked for the burn time, as the skill says. Without being asked, it also pointed out both slips in the Gemini answer above and rewrote it. Its rewrite fixed those two things and came in under the 60-word minimum. Neither model got everything right, and having both in one thread is what brought the slips to the surface.

The free plan includes Gemini 3.8 Flash, Claude Haiku 5.5, GPT-6 Luna, Grok 4.7 and DeepSeek. The $6 Hobby plan adds every other chat model, with one usage allowance across all of them. The pricing page has the current allowances. For the rest of the case for and against leaving Google's app, see Gemini alternatives.

The Bottom Line

Gems on personal accounts stop working on 17 November 2026 and disappear on 17 December. Google will convert them to skills, which are more flexible in an ordinary chat but hold less, skip Canvas, Deep Research and video for now, and can't be shared yet. The part most people will trip over is that skills need Keep Activity on, and Gems needed it only for Drive files.

Before the 17th, copy each Gem's instructions and download its files, starting with the ones that won't carry over. If you're on a Workspace business account, you have until at least March. And because skills are plain SKILL.md files, whatever you build in Gemini from here can move with you.

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Moving a Gem? Paste its instructions into a skill and run them on Gemini, Claude or GPT with izzedo chat's free plan, no credit card required.