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September 25, 2026
Google is removing Gems. Gemini Skills replace them on personal Google accounts from 17 November 2026, and Google says it will recreate every Gem you built as a skill without asking you to do anything. The interesting part is not the rename. It is the three conditions Skills attach that Gems never did.
Two things change about how you reach a saved instruction set. Gems sat in the side panel and you picked one per conversation. Skills are typed into the chat with a slash, and you can combine several at once, according to Notebookcheck, which also reported the migration dates.
Google describes a skill as an instruction set you build once and reuse across chats and tasks, which Gemini can recognise and apply on its own when it fits. You can create one through a guided chat, from a blank or prefilled template, by asking Gemini to write one, or by uploading a file, including a SKILL.md file. The pattern will look familiar if you have already built reusable instructions in another assistant.
What it does not change is the output. Same model, same drafts, same editing pass afterwards. Stacking is a real convenience if you currently paste a tone-of-voice Gem’s instructions into a separate research Gem, and it is nothing at all if you only ever ran one.
To create or use a skill you must be 18 or over, signed in with a personal Google account, and have Keep Activity turned on. That last one is the condition worth reading twice, because Google’s own documentation lists it as a requirement rather than a recommendation.
Keep Activity is what allows human review. Google’s privacy page states that a subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers, including trained service providers, that chats are disconnected from your account before they are sent, and that reviewed chats are retained for up to three years. It also says reviewed chats are not deleted when you delete your activity.
So the trade is explicit. If your Gem is a set of general prompts with nothing sensitive in it, turn the setting on and move on. If it carries client names, unreleased campaign copy, pricing or anything under an NDA, the migration has just made a privacy decision part of your content stack, and it is worth making that decision on purpose.
Turning Keep Activity off is not a clean opt out either. Google says conversations are still kept for up to 72 hours so it can run the service and process feedback. The choice is between three years of review-sample retention and 72 hours, not between retention and none.
Skills do not work on a work or school Google account at all right now. Google’s wording is that the feature is not available if you sign in with a work or school account, which means an agency running on Workspace has nothing to migrate to today.
That is why the dates are staggered. Personal accounts lose Gems on 17 November. Workspace business, enterprise and nonprofit accounts keep them until March 2027, and education accounts until June 2027. If your Gems live on a Workspace login, nothing happens to you in November and rebuilding now would be wasted work.
One correction worth noting, because the first round of coverage got it wrong: Skills are not paywalled. Google’s help page now says skills are available without a Google AI subscription. The rollout is phased, so a free account may still show Gems and no Skills entry for a while yet. That is a queue, not a price.
Gemini Skills carry limits that Gems did not, and they are the part most likely to cost you an afternoon. Uploads are capped at 100 MB in total. Binary formats are not supported, which rules out .docx and .xlsx. Scripts that need internet access do not run. Deleting a skill cannot be undone.
Gems could take files from your device, from Google Drive, or as NotebookLM notebooks, so if your Gem’s knowledge is a brand guidelines Word file and a pricing spreadsheet, those need converting to plain text or markdown before they can be attached to a skill. Check this before November rather than after, because an automatic migration cannot convert a file format for you.
Two more boundaries. Skills only exist in the Gemini mobile app, the Mac app and gemini.google.com, and the upload option is not in the mobile app yet. And a skill is not one of the AI agents that go and do work on your behalf: Google separates skills, tasks and schedules in its own documentation, where a skill supplies the method and a task supplies the objective.
That list takes about an hour for most people, and the first two items are the ones that matter. Everything else can wait until the Skills entry actually appears in your settings.
No. Google’s Gems page says Gems will go away on personal Google accounts starting in November 2026 and will automatically transition to skills. You can also recreate them manually first if you would rather control how they are written.
No. Google’s help page says skills are available without a Google AI subscription. The barriers are the age requirement, the personal account requirement and Keep Activity, not a paid tier.
Not on a personal account once the migration runs. Gems stay available until it does, and Workspace and education accounts have longer. There is no documented way to keep the Gems interface after your account’s date.
No. Nothing in the change touches the model. If your Gem produced drafts that needed heavy editing, the skill version will too, and the fix is better instructions rather than a different menu. The same is true of the content workflows built around it.
Gemini Skills are a better interface to the same thing, with a privacy condition attached and a format restriction that will break some knowledge files. Export your Gem instructions this week, convert any Office files, and make the Keep Activity call yourself. If you are on a Workspace account, put a note in March and forget about it.
This is the kind of thing we work on with clients at Social Lady. If you want a second opinion on where your AI instructions live and who can read them, get in touch.
