Google Built the Only Inheritance Tool in Consumer AI a Decade Before Gemini Existed

The mechanics first, plainly, because most writing on this subject goes straight to feeling and leaves families without the facts.

• What happens to your Gemini chats when you die. Google publishes no post-mortem policy specific to Gemini, so your chats stay in your Google Account under the same settings and clocks that applied while you were alive. Gemini Apps activity is stored there only while the Keep Activity setting is on, and you can read or delete any part of your activity at myactivity.google.com/product/gemini.

• With Keep Activity off. Chats are not saved to your account and are not used to train Google's models. They are still held with the account for up to 72 hours so Gemini can respond and process feedback. Temporary Chats behave the same way.

• The default clock. Gemini Apps activity older than 18 months is auto-deleted. You can change the window to 3 months, 36 months, or off.

• The copy your deletion does not reach. A subset of chats goes to human reviewers, including Google's trained service providers. Those chats are disconnected from your Google Account before review and retained for up to three years, and deleting your Gemini activity does not remove them.

• The handover tool. Inactive Account Manager can pass Google Account data to up to 10 people you nominate, after a period of inactivity you set yourself. Google's help page names Blogger, Drive, Mail and YouTube as examples of shareable data and does not list Gemini Apps.

• What is certain today. Google Takeout exports your Gemini Apps activity and your Gems data, free, in about five minutes.

Checked 29 July 2026.

Inactive Account Manager arrived ten years before there was a Google assistant you could hold a conversation with, and Google has published nothing since about re-scoping that tool for Gemini. Plenty of people have already set the tool up, or at least opened the page and looked at the list of people they could nominate. What none of them can work out from the outside is whether the product they use every day is inside the parcel.

For a lot of people the ratio has flipped. Less searching, more asking. A diagnosis in the family. An argument about a house. A business half seriously considered. A reason for not going to the reunion. That material used to have nowhere to go. Now the material has one home, under one toggle, on one clock.

So the question is narrower than what happens to my Google account. You want to know whether the record of those conversations travels across with the rest of the estate or sits unreachable until a policy changes. The overview page on what happens to your ChatGPT memories when you die sets out how the major assistants differ, and Gemini is the odd one out. Google is the only company in that comparison with an inheritance tool already built, and the tool was designed for an account that contained no assistant at all.

If you are reading this on behalf of someone who has already died, this page will help less than you want. Every move that works here gets made while the account holder is alive.

Yes, your chats are stored in your Google Account. Only while one setting is on, and the setting sits in a menu you may never have opened.

With Keep Activity on, the whole record sits at myactivity.google.com/product/gemini and you can delete any part of the record from there. The default retention window is 18 months, changeable to 3 months, 36 months, or off. On the default setting, reading this in late July 2026, anything you said to Gemini before the end of January 2025 has already gone.

Turn Keep Activity off and future chats stay out of your activity and out of model training. They are still saved with your account for up to 72 hours so Gemini can respond to you, process any feedback, and protect Google and its users. Temporary Chats work the same way: 72 hours, no personalisation, no model training.

One rule cuts against the intuition that deleting is deleting. A subset of chats is read by human reviewers, including Google's trained service providers, disconnected from your Google Account before review and retained for up to three years. Deleting your Gemini activity does not reach those, precisely because they are no longer attached to the account you are deleting from.

So the copy of your Gemini history your family could plausibly receive is the one Google keeps for you. The copy that outlives you longest is the anonymised one Google keeps for its own reviewers, held somewhere no family member can request.

The labels on all of this move, and quickly. Google said on 13 August 2025 that Gemini Apps Activity would be renamed Keep Activity in the following weeks, and that from 2 September 2025 a sample of future uploads would be used to help improve Google services. Temporary Chats arrived in that same announcement, and the personalisation settings have been relabelled since. Read the date at the top of this page before you trust any setting name above.

Google is unusual in publishing those windows at all. Anthropic leads with a single headline number instead, and Claude conversations clearing on a thirty-day clock is easier to summarise mainly because there is no inheritance route to explain.

Google will not tell you whether Gemini is in the parcel. Your own account will.

Google documents this much. Inactive Account Manager triggers only once your account has been inactive for a length of time you set in your own plan, and Google judges inactivity from signals including your last sign-ins, recent activity in My Activity, Gmail usage and Android check-ins. You can nominate up to 10 people and share different data with different people. Nominated contacts are notified only after the account has been inactive for the period you chose, never during setup. If you would rather nobody inherit anything, you can have the account deleted instead.

Google's help page does not publish the list of waiting periods on offer, so the length of the timer is another thing you can only read off your own plan.

What Google does not document at all is the full product list inside the data picker. The help page uses Blogger, Drive, Mail and YouTube as its examples and notes that some information cannot be shared. That is the whole of the public record. There is no published statement either way about Gemini Apps, so anyone telling you confidently that Gemini is included, or confidently that Gemini is excluded, is guessing.

Do this before you read another paragraph. Open your Inactive Account Manager plan, go to the step where you choose data to share, and read the list. If Gemini Apps or My Activity appears there, tick the box and you have closed the gap. If neither appears, you have just learned something specific about your own plan that no article could have told you, and the export two sections down becomes the move that matters.

Our page on how Google's Inactive Account Manager works end to end covers the setup, the notification behaviour and the account-deletion option in full, so this page does not repeat that ground.

Set nothing up and the account goes quiet, and then at some point Google is entitled to delete the whole thing.

Google's inactive account policy defines an inactive Google Account as one that has not been used within a two-year period, and Google reserves the right to delete such an account along with its activity and data. The earliest an account could be deleted under this policy was 1 December 2023. The policy applies to personal Google Accounts and not to accounts issued through work, school or another organisation.

Activity is measured across the account, not per product. Reading an email, using Drive, watching a YouTube video, downloading an app, using Google Search, or using Sign in with Google all count as keeping the account alive. That is a generous definition, and it is why nobody should plan around a specific deletion date. Doing nothing does not mean your Gemini history gets handed over badly. Doing nothing means the whole account can go at once, on a timetable you do not control.

Your family has two things they can ask Google for after you die. They can ask Google to close the account, or they can ask for content from the account. Google can work with immediate family members and representatives to close a deceased person's account where appropriate, and in certain circumstances Google may provide content from a deceased user's account, always after a careful review. Google will not provide passwords or other login details under any circumstances.

The trap sits in the sequencing, and Google states the trap plainly in its own help text: if you select to close the Google account, Google is unable to process any request to turn over the contents of the account at a later date. Closing is a one-way door. A grieving family that wants the account shut down quickly, because the notifications keep arriving, can permanently foreclose the content request they would have wanted six months later. If anyone in your family is ever likely to make one of these requests, write that single fact down for them now, in the same envelope as everything else.

A published route, even a cautious one, is more than most of this field offers. What your family can ask Microsoft for after you die with Copilot has the shorter answer: Microsoft points families at a subpoena or a court order and says it may still be unable to release the content. Against that, a careful review starts to look generous.

Coarse summary of the field. The detail behind every row lives on that row's page.

Every row checked against the vendor's own published policy on 29 July 2026. These policies change without notice, so treat the date as the important column.

Exactly one row has a named tool for passing data to a person you chose, and that tool predates the product it would need to cover. That is the state of the art in July 2026.

Start building your legacy Free build, 50 memories, no card required.

The export is free, and the export is the only part of this that does not hang on somebody else's future decision.

1. Go to takeout.google.com and sign in with the same Google Account you use for Gemini.

2. Click Deselect all so you are not exporting your entire Google life by accident.

3. Tick Gemini to include your Gems data.

4. Tick My Activity, then open the "All activity data included" control and narrow it to Gemini Apps only. This is the part that carries your chats, generated media and uploads.

5. Choose .zip, pick a delivery method and file size, then click Create export.

6. When the link arrives, save the file somewhere a real person can reach without your password, and tell that person where the file is.

Two caveats from Google's own documentation. The export may not include changes made to your data between requesting the download and the export file being created. And downloading does not delete anything: if you also want the data gone from Google, that is a separate action in your activity settings.

Step six is the one people skip. An export sitting in a downloads folder on a laptop nobody can unlock is not a plan, because the same file is one forgotten password away from being useless.

Do all six and you have protected the record, which is the whole of what Google's controls can do for you. The rest of this page is about the half those six steps do not reach.

Open a Takeout export of Gemini activity and look at what is in there. Questions. Half-formed ones, at three in the morning, with typos. Requests for a summary. A prompt asking how to phrase something difficult. The answers belong to Google's model, not to you. Someone opening that folder twenty years from now does not meet the person behind the words. They find a list of things that person needed help with, which is not nothing, and is also not a conversation.

There is a second layer. Gemini has a Memory setting, under Personal Intelligence in settings, which lets Gemini learn from your past chats to understand more about you and your world. Google states that the setting is not available when Keep Activity is off. Google publishes no way to export what Gemini has learned about you. The documented route for removing any of that learning is to delete the underlying chats from your Gemini Apps activity, and the documented route for inspecting it is to ask Gemini directly whether it used anything from past chats. When the account goes, whatever the model made of you goes with the account, and only the raw material behind the model is left to hand on.

That is the actual gap, and it is not a story about carelessness. On the evidence, Google is more careful and more explicit here than most of the field. Every tool described on this page was designed to move records. The assistant that came closest to building a working model of you is the one asset you cannot bequeath.

Google can hand your family the questions you asked. Nothing Google built can hand them the person who asked.

Two other pages pick the thought up directly: who actually controls your face and voice once you are gone, and, for the reasonable objection that none of this is worth doing for someone ordinary, why "I am not important enough to leave anything behind" gets the maths wrong.

Everything above moves files. What families arrive looking for is answers to questions nobody thought to ask in time, and answers in a voice they recognise, which is what we build at Afterlife.ai™.

A guide called Idy interviews you. No forms. An actual conversation that follows what you say and asks the next thing, the way a good interviewer would. What comes out of that becomes memories, each one specific and attributed to you, and you can read back or delete any of them whenever you like. Your voice is cloned from recordings you make, so what your family hears later comes in the voice they know rather than a synthetic reading of your text.

You nominate the people who get access, by name, and nothing is released to them while you are alive. Release happens only through Executor Lock™, a seven-day, evidence-verified process. At the moment the lock triggers, what your family will one day reach is a complete snapshot of every memory you made. Nothing is pruned, nothing is down-weighted, and the personality cannot be changed afterwards.

Put the two systems side by side. Inactive Account Manager transfers files once a timer runs out. Executor Lock transfers your Personas after evidence is verified, to people you named, in a voice that can answer a question nobody planned for in advance. Every concrete detail about your life in those answers has to match a memory you built, and the model is instructed to cut anything that cannot be grounded in one.

The limits, plainly, because we built this and we watch how people use the product every day. What you get back is only as good as the hours you put in. Fifty memories gets you something recognisable in tone and rhythm. Fifty memories does not get you a whole life, and anyone who tells you a weekend of typing produces a parent is selling you something. Depth comes from coming back, which is why the free build has no expiry attached. There will be questions you never covered, and on those the answers come from what your memories do hold rather than from a detail you never gave.

The consent difference is the whole of the argument. Personas here are built by you, from your own memories, in your own voice, while you can still say no, not that, let me tell you what actually happened. Products that reconstruct someone who has already died work from scraps and guesses, without the person's agreement. We do not build those.

Two limits specific to Gemini. We cannot import your Gemini history for you, because Google publishes no route for a third party to read your activity, so anything in that export has to be carried across by you in your own words. And nothing here changes what Google does with the account. Building with us runs alongside Inactive Account Manager and the Takeout export above, never instead of them.

Your first fifty memories are free, no card, and the free build does not expire. That is deliberate. The worst version of this industry charges grieving families at the moment they are least able to refuse.

The toggles, the picker and the export are twenty minutes of work, and they are the highest-value twenty minutes available on this subject. Do them today. Then decide whether the record you leave behind is a folder of the questions you asked, or the answers only you can give.

Start building your legacy Free build, 50 memories, no card required.

If I turn off Keep Activity, is my Gemini history gone?

Not immediately, and not entirely. Keep Activity off stops future chats being saved to your account or used for model training, but those chats are still retained with your account for up to 72 hours so the service can run. Anything already stored stays until you delete the activity yourself or the 18-month auto-delete clears the record. Chats already seen by human reviewers are retained for up to three years regardless.

Will my Inactive Account Manager contacts receive my Gemini chats?

Google does not publish a definitive list of shareable data types, and its help page names only Blogger, Drive, Mail and YouTube as examples while noting that some information cannot be shared. Open your own plan, go to the data-selection step, and read what is offered. That takes a minute and gives you a real answer for your account rather than a general one.

Can my family get my Gemini history if I set nothing up?

Possibly, but do not count on that. Google can work with immediate family and representatives to close a deceased person's account, and in certain circumstances may provide content, after careful review. Once a request to close the account is submitted, Google cannot later process a request for the account's contents. Order matters more than most families realise at the time.

Does Google use my Gemini chats to train its models?

Only under certain settings. Chats are not used for training when Keep Activity is off, and Temporary Chats are excluded too. The separate setting that lets Google use your audio, Gemini Live video and screen shares to improve its services is off by default and requires Keep Activity to be on. Check both settings rather than assuming either state.

What does Afterlife.ai cost, and who owns what I build?

You own your Personas and every memory inside them, and you can delete any of them at any time. Building costs nothing to start: 50 memories, no card, and the free build never expires. Nobody, including nominated people, can reach your Personas while you are alive unless you choose to share something deliberately.

What happens if Afterlife.ai shuts down?

There is an export in your account settings that downloads your profile, your Personas, your memories and your conversations as a file you keep. That is the honest baseline any service in this category should offer, and the first question worth asking any of them. A company promising permanence without an export path is asking you to trust a business model.

• What happens to your Claude conversations when you die covers the assistant with the cleanest export and the least published guidance for families.

• What happens to your Copilot data when you die is the other case where an assistant sits inside an account that already has an inheritance process attached.

• What happens to your Meta AI memories when you die shows how a legacy-contact system that covers the profile stops dead at the assistant.

• How Executor Lock releases your Personas to the people you named is the practical next step, because every route on this page needs a named person and a verified trigger rather than a timer.

Everything factual here comes from primary sources: Google's Gemini Apps and Google Account help documentation, Google's published inactive-account policy, Google's deceased-user request pages, and Google's product blog for the dates on which settings were renamed or introduced. The table was checked row by row against each vendor's own published policy, linked in the source column, on 29 July 2026. No third-party summaries or vendor marketing pages were used as a factual basis.

Four things are not settled. Google does not publish the full list of data types Inactive Account Manager can share, so whether Gemini Apps activity appears in your own picker can only be confirmed by opening your plan. Google does not publish the waiting periods the setup flow offers, which is why no list of months appears above. Google publishes no post-mortem policy specific to Gemini, only the account-wide deceased-user process, and no export route for what the Memory setting has learned about you. Several vendors in the table publish no deceased-user route at all, and an absence of published policy is recorded here as an absence, not as a denial.

Found something out of date or wrong? Tell us through our contact page and we will check the source and correct the page. If you want to see what the paid tiers add on top of the free build, our plans page sets them out.

1. Google, "Manage and delete your activity in Gemini Apps", Gemini Apps Help. https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13278892 (checked 29 July 2026)

2. Google, "Gemini Apps Privacy Hub", Gemini Apps Help. https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961 (checked 29 July 2026)

3. Google, "Get personalization based on your past Gemini chats", Gemini Apps Help. https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16598469 (checked 29 July 2026)

4. Google, "Download your Gemini Apps data", Gemini Apps Help. https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16920332 (checked 29 July 2026)

5. Google, "About Inactive Account Manager", Google Account Help. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546 (checked 29 July 2026)

6. Google, "Inactive Google Account Policy", Google Account Help. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290 (checked 29 July 2026)

7. Google, "Submit a request regarding a deceased user's account", Google Account Help. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6357606 and https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/6357590 (checked 29 July 2026)

8. Google, "Gemini app personalizes responses based on past chats, plus new privacy controls", blog.google, 13 August 2025. https://blog.google/products/gemini/temporary-chats-privacy-controls/

9. Google, "Plan your digital afterlife with Inactive Account Manager", Google Public Policy Blog, 11 April 2013. https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2013/04/plan-your-digital-afterlife-with.html

10. Microsoft, "Conversation history in Microsoft Copilot", Microsoft Support. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/conversation-history-in-microsoft-copilot-9a07325a-0366-4c2d-82cb-dab61be8287c (checked 29 July 2026)

11. Anthropic, "Export your Claude data", Anthropic Privacy Center. https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/9450526-export-your-claude-data (checked 29 July 2026)

12. X, "Contacting X about a deceased family member's account", X Help Center. https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/contact-x-about-a-deceased-family-members-account (checked 29 July 2026)

13. Perplexity, "Account Deletion" and "Self-Serve Data Deletion", Perplexity Help Center. https://www.perplexity.ai/help-center/en/articles/10354879-account-deletion (checked 29 July 2026)

Platform policy checked: 29 July 2026. Last reviewed: 30 July 2026. This page is on a 30-day recheck cycle.