Guest accounts in Google Workspace is now generally available

Google has introduced guest accounts in Google Workspace, allowing users to chat with people outside their organization via Google Chat, and more.

Google has announced that guest accounts in Google Workspace is now generally available, introducing a new way for organizations to collaborate with external partners, clients, and vendors who do not have a Google account.

Each guest account you invite through a direct message or a Chat Space receives a unique account identifier after the system creates it. Once the invitation occurs, the system automatically places these accounts into a specific Workspace Guests organizational unit within the Admin console. On the frontend, guests can be @mentioned and will have an "external" label with a teal color attached to their name.

Admins can turn off external chatting if they don't want users to invite guests. To do this, navigate to the Admin Console, then go to Apps, Google Workspace, Google Chat, and then select External Chat Settings to turn the option off for specific organizational units or the entire domain.

That said, there are a couple of things to note. First, if an external contact is a Workspace user at another company, you can only chat with them if they have an admin who decided to turn on Google Chat for their organization.

Second, when admins turn off the guest feature, any existing guest access doesn't just magically disappear. Your internal users lose access, but the guest's account and their access to previously shared files remain until an admin manually removes them. In addition to that, guests cannot create or own new files in Google Drive; they can only modify existing files. Finally, while you can add non-Workspace domains to a trusted allowlist, doing so blocks collaboration with all consumer Google accounts.

Guest accounts on Google Workspace will start rolling out for end users between April 13 and April 16, 2026. The new admin controls for this feature became available to administrators in a gradual rollout that began on March 26, 2026. The feature is available to customers on Business Starter, Standard, and Plus plans, as well as Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus tiers.

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Posted Tuesday 31 March 2026 at 6:12 pm AEST (my time).

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