Effective May 22, 2024 | Archived versions | Download PDF

Country version: United States

What’s covered in these terms

We know it’s tempting to skip these Terms of Service, but it’s important to establish what you can expect from us as you use Google services, and what we expect from you.

These Terms of Service reflect the way Google’s business works, the laws that apply to our company, and certain things we’ve always believed to be true. As a result, these Terms of Service help define Google’s relationship with you as you interact with our services. For example, these terms include the following topic headings:

• What you can expect from us, which describes how we provide and develop our services
• What we expect from you, which establishes certain rules for using our services
• Content in Google services, which describes the intellectual property rights to the content you find in our services — whether that content belongs to you, Google, or others
• In case of problems or disagreements, which describes other legal rights you have, and what to expect in case someone violates these terms

Understanding these terms is important because, by accessing or using our services (whether you’re signed in to a Google account or not), you’re agreeing to these terms.

Besides these terms, we also publish a Privacy Policy. We encourage you to read it to better understand how you can update, manage, export, and delete your information.

Terms

Service provider

Google services are provided by, and you’re contracting with:

Google LLC
organized under the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, and operating under the laws of the USA

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, California 94043
USA

Age requirements

If you’re under the age required to manage your own Google Account, you must have your parent or legal guardian’s permission to use a Google Account. Please have your parent or legal guardian read these terms with you.

If you’re a parent or legal guardian, and you allow your child to use the services, then these terms apply to you and you’re responsible for your child’s activity on the services.

Some Google services have additional age requirements as described in their service-specific additional terms and policies.

Your relationship with Google

These terms help define the relationship between you and Google. When we speak of “Google,” “we,” “us,” and “our,” we mean Google LLC and its affiliates. Broadly speaking, we give you permission to access and use our services if you agree to follow these terms, which reflect how Google’s business works and how we earn money.

What you can expect from us

Provide a broad range of useful services

Many of these services also include content that you can stream or interact with.

Our services are designed to work together, making it easier for you to move from one activity to the next. For example, if your Calendar event includes an address, you can click on that address and Maps can show you how to get there.

Develop, improve, and update Google services

We’re constantly developing new technologies and features to improve our services. For example, we use artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide you with simultaneous translations, and to better detect and block spam and malware. As part of this continual improvement, we sometimes add or remove features and functionalities, increase or decrease limits to our services, and start offering new services or stop offering old ones. When a service requires or includes downloadable or preloaded software, that software sometimes updates automatically on your device once a new version or feature is available. Some services let you adjust your automatic update settings.

If we make material changes that negatively impact your use of our services or if we stop offering a service, we’ll provide you with reasonable advance notice, except in urgent situations such as preventing abuse, responding to legal requirements, or addressing security and operability issues. We’ll also provide you with an opportunity to export your content from your Google Account using Google Takeout, subject to applicable law and policies.

What we expect from you

Follow these terms and service-specific additional terms

You also agree that our Privacy Policy applies to your use of our services. We also provide resources like the Copyright Help Center, Safety Center, Transparency Center, and descriptions of our technologies from our policies site to answer common questions and to set expectations about using our services. Finally, we may provide specific instructions and warnings within our services – such as dialog boxes that alert you to important information.

Although we give you permission to use our services, we retain any intellectual property rights we have in the services.

Respect others

Our service-specific additional terms and policies, such as our Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy, provide additional details about appropriate conduct that everyone using those services must follow. If you find that others aren’t following these rules, many of our services allow you to report abuse. If we act on a report of abuse, we also provide the process described in the Taking action in case of problems section.

Don’t abuse our services

Most people who access or use our services understand the general rules that keep the internet safe and open. Unfortunately, a small number of people don’t respect those rules, so we’re describing them here to protect our services and users from abuse. In that spirit:

You must not abuse, harm, interfere with, or disrupt our services or systems — for example, by:

• introducing malware
• spamming, hacking, or bypassing our systems or protective measures
• jailbreaking, adversarial prompting, or prompt injection, except as part of our safety and bug testing programs
• accessing or using our services or content in fraudulent or deceptive ways, such as:
  • phishing
  • creating fake accounts or content, including fake reviews
  • misleading others into thinking that generative AI content was created by a human
  • providing services that appear to originate from you (or someone else) when they actually originate from us
• providing services that appear to originate from us when they do not
• using our services (including the content they provide) to violate anyone’s legal rights, such as intellectual property or privacy rights
• reverse engineering our services or underlying technology, such as our machine learning models, to extract trade secrets or other proprietary information, except as allowed by applicable law
• using automated means to access content from any of our services in violation of the machine-readable instructions on our web pages (for example, robots.txt files that disallow crawling, training, or other activities)
• using AI-generated content from our services to develop machine learning models or related AI technology
• hiding or misrepresenting who you are in order to violate these terms
• providing services that encourage others to violate these terms

Permission to use your content

Some of our services are designed to let you upload, submit, store, send, receive, or share your content. You have no obligation to provide any content to our services and you’re free to choose the content that you want to provide. If you choose to upload or share content, please make sure you have the necessary rights to do so and that the content is lawful.

Using Google services

Your Google Account

If you meet these age requirements you can create a Google Account for your convenience. Some services require that you have a Google Account in order to work — for example, to use Gmail, you need a Google Account so that you have a place to send and receive your email.

You’re responsible for what you do with your Google Account, including taking reasonable steps to keep your Google Account secure, and we encourage you to regularly use the Security Checkup.

Using Google services on behalf of an organization or business

Service-related communications

To provide you with our services, we sometimes send you service announcements and other information. To learn more about how we communicate with you, see Google’s Privacy Policy.

If you choose to give us feedback, such as suggestions to improve our services, we may act on your feedback without obligation to you.

Content in Google services

Your content

Some of our services allow you to generate original content. Google won’t claim ownership over that content.

Some of our services give you the opportunity to make your content publicly available — for example, you might post a product or restaurant review that you wrote, or you might upload a blog post that you created.

• See the Permission to use your content section for more about your rights in your content, and how your content is used in our services
• See the Removing your content section to learn why and how we might remove user-generated content from our services

If you think someone is infringing your intellectual property rights, you can send us notice of the infringement and we’ll take appropriate action. For example, we suspend or close the Google Accounts of repeat copyright infringers as described in our Copyright Help Center.

Google content

Some of our services include content that belongs to Google — for example, many of the visual illustrations you see in Google Maps. You may use Google’s content as allowed by these terms and any service-specific additional terms, but we retain any intellectual property rights that we have in our content. Don’t remove, obscure, or alter any of our branding, logos, or legal notices. If you want to use our branding or logos, please see the Google Brand Permissions page.

Other content

Finally, some of our services give you access to content that belongs to other people or organizations — for example, a store owner’s description of their own business, or a newspaper article displayed in Google News. You may not use this content without that person or organization’s permission, or as otherwise allowed by law. The views expressed in other people or organizations’ content are theirs, and don’t necessarily reflect Google’s views.

Software in Google services

Some of our services include downloadable or preloaded software. We give you permission to use that software as part of the services.

Some of our services include software that’s offered under open source license terms that we make available to you. Sometimes there are provisions in the open source license that explicitly override parts of these terms, so please be sure to read those licenses.

You may not copy, modify, distribute, sell, or lease any part of our services or software.

In case of problems or disagreements

Warranty disclaimer

We built our reputation on providing useful, reliable services like Google Search and Maps, and we’re continuously improving our services to meet your needs. However, for legal purposes, we offer our services without warranties unless explicitly stated in our service-specific additional terms. The law requires that we explain this using specific legal language and that we use capital letters to help make sure you see it, as follows:

TO THE EXTENT ALLOWED BY APPLICABLE LAW, WE PROVIDE OUR SERVICES “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. FOR EXAMPLE, WE DON’T MAKE ANY WARRANTIES ABOUT THE CONTENT OR FEATURES OF THE SERVICES, INCLUDING THEIR ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, OR ABILITY TO MEET YOUR NEEDS.

DON’T RELY ON THE SERVICES FOR MEDICAL, LEGAL, FINANCIAL, OR OTHER PROFESSIONAL ADVICE. ANY CONTENT REGARDING THOSE TOPICS IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR ADVICE FROM A QUALIFIED PROFESSIONAL.

Liabilities

For all users

Both the law and these terms try to strike a balance as to what you or Google can claim from the other in case of problems. That’s why the law requires everyone to be responsible for certain liabilities — but not others — under these terms.

These terms only limit our responsibilities as allowed by applicable law. These terms don’t limit liability for gross negligence or willful misconduct.

For business users and organizations only

If you’re a business user or organization:

• To the extent allowed by applicable law, you’ll indemnify Google and its directors, officers, employees, and contractors for any third-party legal proceedings (including actions by government authorities) arising out of or relating to your unlawful use of the services or violation of these terms or service-specific additional terms. This indemnity covers any liability or expense arising from claims, losses, damages, judgments, fines, litigation costs, and legal fees.
• If you’re legally exempt from certain responsibilities, including indemnification, then those responsibilities don’t apply to you under these terms. For example, the United Nations enjoys certain immunities from legal obligations and these terms don’t override those immunities.

Taking action in case of problems

Before taking action as described below, we’ll provide you with advance notice when reasonably possible, describe the reason for our action, and give you an opportunity to clarify the issue and address it, unless doing so would:

• cause harm or liability to a user, third party, or Google
• violate the law or a legal enforcement authority’s order
• compromise an investigation
• compromise the operation, integrity, or security of our services

Removing your content

If any of your content (1) breaches these terms, service-specific additional terms or policies, (2) violates applicable law, or (3) could harm our users, third parties, or Google, then we reserve the right to take down some or all of that content in accordance with applicable law. Examples include child pornography, content that facilitates human trafficking or harassment, terrorist content, and content that infringes someone else’s intellectual property rights.

Suspending or terminating your access to Google services

Without limiting any of our other rights, Google may suspend or terminate your access to the services or delete your Google Account if any of these things happen:

• you materially or repeatedly breach these terms, service-specific additional terms or policies
• we’re required to do so to comply with a legal requirement or a court order
• your conduct causes harm or liability to a user, third party, or Google — for example, by hacking, phishing, harassing, spamming, misleading others, or scraping content that doesn’t belong to you

For more information about why we disable accounts and what happens when we do, see this Help Center page. If you believe your Google Account has been suspended or terminated in error, you can appeal.

Of course, you’re always free to stop using our services at any time. If you do stop using a service, we’d appreciate knowing why so that we can continue improving our services.

Settling disputes, governing law, and courts

For information about how to contact Google, please visit our contact page.

California law will govern all disputes arising out of or relating to these terms, service-specific additional terms, or any related services, regardless of conflict of laws rules. These disputes will be resolved exclusively in the federal or state courts of Santa Clara County, California, USA, and you and Google consent to personal jurisdiction in those courts.