Gemini makes a play for AI users with seamless history imports

• Import Memory handles your accumulated personal context, the preferences, interests, relationships, habits, and instructions that your current AI has learnt about you over time. The process works like an assisted handover rather than a direct data sync. Gemini provides a ready-made prompt that you copy and paste into your existing AI app. That app then generates a structured summary of everything it knows about you: your background, sustained interests, confirmed relationships, recurring instructions, and dated events or projects. You copy that summary and paste it back into Gemini, which processes it and saves those details to your Gemini context, ready to use in your next conversation.
• Import Chat History is the more comprehensive option, designed for those who want to bring across their full conversation archive rather than just a synthesised summary of what an AI knows about them. Users export their chat logs from ChatGPT or Claude, both platforms already provide this as a standard .zip download through their account settings, and upload those files to Gemini. The current limits are up to 5 .zip files per day, with each file capped at 5 GB. Once uploaded, imported conversations appear in the standard Gemini side panel with a distinct icon to mark them as imported. They are searchable, and users can choose to build on those threads within Gemini or delete batches they no longer want.

Alongside the import tools, Google is making a quiet but telling naming change: “past chats” in Gemini is being renamed to “Memory”. The shift will roll out across the app over the coming weeks. It is a small word change, but it signals something larger about how Google wants users to think about their relationship with Gemini. The goal, as Google put it in the official blog post, is for Gemini to become a “Personal Intelligence” assistant, one that integrates imported context with data from Gmail, Google Photos, Search history, and past Gemini conversations to build a genuinely personalised picture of the user, where permissions have been granted.

The example Google gives is if you previously used another AI to research hotels for a trip to Barcelona, Gemini should be able to access that imported context to help you finalise your itinerary around the neighbourhood you already picked, without you having to re-explain your requirements from scratch. Whether that integration works as described in practice will depend on how cleanly the imported data maps to Gemini’s own memory architecture, which is something independent testing will reveal over time.

Not the first to do this

Google isn’t inventing this concept from scratch, with Anthropic having moved first in this area. Earlier in March 2026, Anthropic launched a similar import memory feature for Claude at claude.com/import-memory, using essentially the same prompt-based method, where users  generate a summary in their old AI app, paste it into Claude. Anthropic has also made clear that the memories imported into Claude are encrypted and, crucially, not used for model training, a meaningful distinction that we will come back to.

There is, however, a notable difference in scope between what Anthropic and Google are offering. Anthropic’s tool focuses on memory transfer, the distilled, curated summary of what an AI knows about you. Google’s offering adds full chat history import on top of that, which is a considerably larger amount of data. Chat histories are everything, including the throwaway questions, debugging sessions, and conversations you might not actively want to preserve, let alone share.

The strategic logic of that normalisation is important. It is a move that looks generous on its surface. Google is making it easier for you to bring your data anywhere, but it is also establishing a principle that benefits Google specifically at this moment. Gemini is playing catch-up to ChatGPT in consumer mindshare. ChatGPT has reached 900 million weekly active users, according to recent figures from OpenAI. Gemini, by Google’s own Q4 2024 disclosure, has surpassed 750 million monthly active users, itself a significant number, but from a different baseline (monthly, not weekly). 

OpenAI is the obvious party to watch here, and it has not yet announced a comparable import-from-competitors feature for ChatGPT. As the market leader, the strategic incentive to make switching out of ChatGPT easy is substantially lower than the incentive facing challengers like Google and Anthropic. OpenAI is required under GDPR and equivalent regulations to provide users with their data exports, which is why the .zip chat download exists, but it also can’t prevent those exports from being used as the basis for a migration to a competitor.

The data privacy issue

There is a question that lies beneath all of this that is worth addressing directly: what happens to imported data once it is inside Gemini?

Google has stated that the process is user-mediated. Meaning the company does not automatically scrape data from other services, and that the feature is, for now, only available to personal Google accounts. Work, school, and supervised accounts are excluded, as are users under 18 years of age. That is a deliberate choice that limits the most sensitive categories of potential data transfer.

However, reporting from Windows Forum noted that early beta screenshots showed imported conversations and subsequent interactions being stored in Gemini Activity, and potentially being used to train Google’s models. This is consistent with Google’s existing default data handling for consumer Gemini accounts, which does allow data to be used for model improvement unless the user actively opts out via Gemini Apps Activity settings. Users importing sensitive content like personal data, professional information, and client details should be aware of this before uploading their chat archives and should check their Google account settings accordingly. Google has not, as of writing, published specific terms that distinguish the handling of imported data from natively generated Gemini conversations.

The geographic exclusion is also notable, with the feature not available in the European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland, or the United Kingdom. This is consistent with the pattern Google has applied to other Gemini features that involve personal data processing in ways that intersect with the GDPR and UK data protection legislation. No timeline has been given for when or whether these regions will gain access.

How to get started

The import feature is accessible via gemini.google.com/import or through the Gemini settings page. It requires a personal Google account, and users must be 18 or older. The feature is rolling out now to most consumer accounts globally, excluding the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK.

To export from ChatGPT: click your username at the bottom left, go to Settings, then Data controls, then click Export next to “Export data” and confirm. A download link will be sent to your account email.

To export from Claude: click your username at the bottom left, go to Settings, then Privacy, click Export next to “Export data”, select your preferred date range, and click Export. A download link will follow by email.

Uploaded chats will appear in the Gemini side panel with an import icon. They are searchable and can be deleted in batches. The memory import, once processed, is saved directly to your Gemini context and will be applied to future conversations automatically.