Google Gemini API File Search Goes Multimodal — Native Image + Text RAG with Page-Level Citations

Google Blog·high signal

Google expanded the Gemini API File Search tool with three major capabilities: multimodal retrieval (images and text indexed together via Gemini Embedding 2), custom metadata filters, and page-level citations that tie responses directly to source pages. Supports PDFs, DOCX, Excel, CSV, JSON, Jupyter notebooks, and images up to 4K resolution. Storage and query-time embeddings are free — you only pay for initial indexing and standard Gemini tokens.