So if I understand you correctly, Gemini has direct free access to the Google Maps API in a manner that others (people, LLMs) would need to sign up for API access and pay for?
Re:Gemini 3.8 Flash
by mark_l_watson on Thursday September 03, 2026 @09:00AM
(#49549408)
That is my understanding, which is a nice thing. I use Exa and Brave search APIs separately but the Google bundling is convenient.
Ollama Cloud offers the same thing: they supply a web search tool bundled with cloud API inference services.
Using grounding in Gemini is indeed backed by the same canonical data source for business information (like opening hours) as Google Maps. This stuff is available in its own API for a GCP fee, but we’ve built tooling to connect it to the Gemini agentic ecosystem as well.