This article is for administrators who manage their organization's Google Workspace or Cloud Identity account.
Meeting conversations overview
With the launch of Chat in Meet, Google Chat will create a series of Meeting conversations up to 7 days in advance of a meeting. These meetings will show up in your admin space management tool and audit logging and reporting. Note, that any unused meeting conversation will be auto-deleted within 8 days from the creation date. We are looking into separating out system created conversations clearly in the admin console as a follow update in the next few months.
Meeting level host setting
If a meeting host turns off continuous meeting chat, in-meeting messages will revert to the old experience. Messages aren't saved in Google Chat and aren't subject to your organization's data retention policies.
- Admin settings: Currently, you cannot turn off Meeting conversations for your whole domain. Note, that this feature is in development.
- Admin Console: External, drop-in, and anonymous user activity in meeting conversations is included in log events reporting.
Meeting conversations will begin to show in the spaces section in Admin space management and reporting. Meeting conversations are system generated, so all Meeting conversations are available via audit logs whether they're used or not. You can find these logs in the Google Admin console under ReportingAudit and investigation
Chat log events.
As part of the continuous meeting launch, you may notice an increase in reported space usage.
Where to access continuous conversation data
Because Meeting conversations are actual Chat spaces created by the system, you will notice changes in four specific areas of the Admin Console. This activity is expected behavior.
Apps Reports
Apps report data can be found under ReportsApps Reports
Google Chat.
You may observe an increase in the Created spaces metric within the Chat reports graph. This increase reflects the system automatically generating spaces 7 days prior to scheduled meetings. This is not necessarily indicative of increased manual user activity.
Space Management Tool
Meeting conversations can be accessed in the Space Management Tool under AppsGoogle Workspace
Settings for Google Chat
Manage Spaces.
These spaces are managed like any other space, though they will be automatically deleted if unused. For more information, see Automatic Meeting Chat conversation deletion below.
Note: We are looking into separating system-created conversations in a future update to reduce clutter in this view.
Audit and Investigation
The creation of these spaces generates Room created events in the Chat audit logs. These can be found under ReportingAudit and investigation
Chat log events.
Note: Even though these spaces are system-generated, the Actor field in the audit log may list the meeting organizer rather than a generic system account. This indicates the user on whose behalf the space was prepared.
Vault and Takeout
If you have domain wide takeout or vault take out settings please read for more information read, Retain Google Chat messages with Vault.
Note: If you initiate a domain-wide takeout with continuous meeting chats active, you may experience an increase in space volume due to the addition of system generated spaces.
Automatic Meeting Chat conversation deletion
Google Chat automatically and permanently deletes empty and inactive system generated conversations (such as meeting conversations). Meeting conversations may be system generated up to 7-days before a meeting is scheduled to start.
System generated conversations are deleted only if all of these conditions are met:
- The space contains no user-generated messages, whether visible or soft-deleted. System-generated messages (e.g., users joining or leaving) are excluded.
- No pinned resources or tasks.
- The space isn't emailable. Learn more.
- No user activity (for example, message sends, file uploads, participant changes) has taken place in the conversation for the past 8 consecutive days.
Note: This only occurred after 30 days in November and early December 2025, but has since been reduced to 8 days. You may see a spike in activity for this duration, but it should reduce significantly in the future.
This deletion of user generated or system generated conversations includes the conversation name and membership list. These conversations are subject to applicable Google Vault policies. This process does not conflict with Google Vault message retention policies or legal holds, as it only applies to conversations confirmed to have no messages.
Administrators can find deletion records for Chat audit logs in the Google Admin Console.
