Google is gifting a year of Gemini Advanced to every college student in the US

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has reportedly set a goal for the company to reach 500 million Gemini users before the end of 2025. Rolling out new models may help the company get there, but you know what else helps? Giving away premium features for free. Google has announced today that it's giving all US college students free access to Gemini Advanced, and not just for a month or two—the offer is good for a full year of service. With Gemini Advanced, you get access to the more capable Pro models, as well as unlimited use of the Deep Research tool based on it. Subscribers also get a smattering of other AI tools, like the Veo 2 video generator, NotebookLM, and Gemini Live. The offer is for the Google One AI Premium plan, so it includes more than premium AI models, like Gemini features in Google Drive and 2TB of Drive storage. Google has a new landing page for the deal, allowing eligible students to sign up for their free Google One AI Premium plan. The offer is valid from now until June 30. Anyone who takes Google up on it will enjoy the free plan through spring 2026. The company hasn't specified an end date, but we would wager it will be June of next year. Google's intention is to give students an entire school year of Gemini Advanced from now through finals next year. At the end of the term, you can bet Google will try to convert students to paying subscribers. As for who qualifies as a "student" in this promotion, Google isn't bothering with a particularly narrow definition. As long as you have a valid .edu email address, you can sign up for the offer. That's something that plenty of people who are not actively taking classes still have. You probably won't even be taking undue advantage of Google if you pretend to be a student—the company really, really wants people to use Gemini, and it's willing to lose money in the short term to make that happen.

Playing catch-up

While Google essentially invented the underlying technology that made large language models (LLMs) into the tech obsession they are today, it was slow to take advantage of that. After releasing its seminal 2017 paper on the transformer attention mechanism, the company used the technology in a few internal tools and operational features that users didn't see. It was OpenAI that carved a path to launching the chatbots that have increasingly taken over the Internet when ChatGPT hit the scene in 2022.

Google struggled to gain traction with Bard and the early Gemini releases, and the company's massive scale only does so much. Google doesn't release exact Gemini usage numbers, but some third-party analyses suggest it sees between 250 and 275 million users per month. OpenAI, on the other hand, says ChatGPT sees more than 400 million weekly users. Even by the lax standards of self-reported usage metrics, that suggests a significant lead for OpenAI. There are millions of people out there who are learning to use ChatGPT instead of going to Google, and that's a problem for the search giant. Like it or not, generative AI is becoming deeply integrated into society. There is already strong evidence that policymakers are using these tools to devise their plans, like the Trump administration's reciprocal tariffs that were recently rolled out and subsequently canceled. In spite of all the problems with this type of AI, people are using and relying on it more. With its tendency to offer free access to premium AI tools, Google clearly wants people to integrate Gemini into their lives over ChatGPT as they adjust to the AI era. If that means giving away its best AI products to anyone with a .edu email, then apparently that's what Google will do.