Google (2025)Copied

Google's G is one of the most familiar marks in tech, the front door to search on phones. So when it changed in May 2025, the shift was small in drawing and big in meaning. The Verge reported that an update to the Google app on iOS and Pixel phones showed a new G that blends red, yellow, green and blue into a gradient, the company's first logo change in almost ten years, a story first spotted by 9to5Google.

The previous major change came in September 2015, when Google moved its wordmark to a sans serif and introduced a G that carried all four brand colours as distinct segments. The new version keeps the shape and the colours but removes the hard borders between them. As 9to5Google described it, red melts into yellow, yellow into green and green into blue.

Google offered no detailed explanation at launch, and did not immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment. The outlet pointed to the most obvious context: the blended look brings the G in line with the gradient Google uses for its Gemini AI brand. The rollout was gradual. At first only iOS and Pixel phones showed it, while the web and other Android devices kept the segmented version. Within weeks, 9to5Google reported, the new G had appeared on stage at the I/O 2025 keynote, become the google.com favicon, replaced the icon in the Search widget, including its Dynamic Color variant, and topped the AI Mode input page.

The wordmark itself was not touched. This is an icon change, aimed at app and system surfaces where the G stands alone.

Read through the Gemini lens, the logic is clear. Google is trying to make its search brand and its AI brand feel like one family, and soft gradients have become the house style of AI products generally. Blending the colours makes the G look more fluid and less like four separate services glued together. The trade off is clarity. The 2015 G was crisp, flat and instantly legible at tiny sizes; gradients muddy at favicon scale, as 9to5Google itself noted when it said the effect was hard to make out there. It also nudges one of the most distinctive marks in tech toward the same glowing look every AI startup uses. Small change, but a revealing one about where Google thinks its future lies.