Google has added a Gemini chatbot to Maps. It is useful. It is also slightly unsettling.
The feature is called Ask Maps. It sits inside the Google Maps app and lets you type questions the way you might ask a well-travelled friend: plan me a day in the city, find me a coffee shop where I can bring a laptop, what is there to do near here on a rainy afternoon.
Gemini pulls from Google user reviews and other data to build an answer, and in some cases will chart a full itinerary with transit directions and suggested departure times.
Allison Johnson, a senior reviewer at The Verge, spent a day testing it in Seattle. The results were mostly good, with caveats worth understanding before you hand your afternoon over to a chatbot.
What it does well
The core promise of Ask Maps is that it can stitch things together. Google Maps has always been competent at getting you from one place to another. It has been less good at helping you figure out what to do when you get there. The explore tab exists, but it tends to surface the same heavily reviewed destinations every time, which is not much help if you already know those places.
Ask Maps can go further. Johnson asked Gemini to plan a full day: lunch, a walk, a coffee shop to work from, public transit throughout, home by 4:30pm on a tight budget. Gemini produced an itinerary. It suggested a taco place, a walk through Volunteer Park, and a stop at the conservatory inside the park, which Johnson had not considered. The conservatory turned out to be a good call.
The feature also handles the kind of specific searches that Maps manages poorly. Finding somewhere that does a good breakfast sandwich and a decent cup of coffee in the same building, for instance, or a coffee shop with enough space to work without feeling like you are in the way. Gemini can interpret that kind of request in a way that a keyword search cannot.
Where it falls short
The system initially suggested places Johnson had already been to. Gemini is drawing on her location history, which Google Maps has been accumulating for years, and its first instinct was to recommend the familiar. She had to prompt it specifically to find somewhere new.
The itinerary also could not be exported. No option to send it to a calendar or a document. You plan a day with a chatbot and then screenshot it.
The privacy question
This is where Ask Maps becomes harder to evaluate. Google Maps has been collecting location data for a long time. Ask Maps makes that history more visible and more active. Johnson described getting monthly email digests summarising everywhere she had been. The idea of a chatbot with access to that archive, one that knows her home address, her commute, her child's name, and years of location history, produced a feeling she described as close to terrifying.
The interface is trying to work out how much of a user's history it can surface before it stops feeling like a search engine and starts feeling like surveillance. That line is not in the same place for everyone.
The broader question is what Ask Maps does to other sources of recommendation. Sites like Eater curate restaurants with editorial judgment. If Gemini is good enough to replace that for everyday decisions, the market for specialist curation gradually shrinks. Google has not historically been good at discovery. Ask Maps is a serious attempt to change that, which is reason enough to pay attention.