Governed Growth, Part 2: The Retention Window That Quietly Shrank
On February 23, 2026, Google quietly made the retention terms for Grounding with Google Search better: the window dropped from thirty days to up to three, and what's kept narrowed from your prompts and output to short-lived debug logs. The old thirty-day, prompts-and-output language didn't vanish—it now describes Grounding with Google Maps, a sibling capability under the same terms. Here's what the corrected terms actually say, how to verify the date yourself from Google's dated archive, and the durable lesson: govern facts that move—cite the dated primary source, hedge the number, and don't hard-code a digit that will drift out from under you.
