Google Privacy Policy Update Allows Ad Targeting From Gmail, Drive, and Photos When Linked to Personal Intelligence

Google’s privacy policy update on October 16 allows personalized ads to be served using content from Gmail, Drive and Photos when users link those services to the Personal Intelligence feature in Search or Gemini, meaning Google can now mine private user data for ad targeting. For website owners, this shift signals that competitors will have richer user profiles to match against site content, increasing the relevance—and volume—of AI‑generated traffic. Bots powered by Google’s Personal Intelligence may crawl sites to extract contextual cues that feed into ad algorithms, potentially inflating pageviews without delivering genuine human engagement. This raises the stakes for accurate bot detection and for ensuring your llms.txt file clearly declares which LLMs are permitted to index your content. Actionable steps: 1) Update your llms.txt to explicitly list Google’s Personal Intelligence and Gemini as “allowed” or “disallowed” based on your policy, preventing unwanted AI scraping. 2) Deploy a real‑time bot‑tracking solution that flags traffic originating from Google’s AI user‑agents (e.g., “Google‑Personal‑Intelligence/…”) and distinguishes it from regular crawlers. 3) Adjust your ad‑targeting analytics to filter out AI‑generated impressions, ensuring revenue metrics reflect true human visitors.