Gmail summary cards now include travel, events, invoices, and shopping emails

In an effort to make it easier to find all the items buried in your inbox, Gmail is rolling out a big update to its Summary Cards feature that attempts to surface the most important information in your messages before you even need to ask about it.

If you’ve ever encountered summary cards in Gmail, it’s likely been in the context of purchasing something. If you open an order confirmation email, Gmail may place a box at the top showing the items you’ve purchased and your purchase total, as well as a link to track the package. Going forward, this box should be more useful and timely, says Maria Fernandez Guajardo, senior product manager at Gmail. When you are waiting for your package, you may be shown its arrival time; Once it arrives, it will provide a link to the company’s return policy. “The action will be relevant to the stage you are in,” she says.

Shopping is one of the sectors that… These are new summary cards for Gmail It should appear. The others are Events, Travel, and Invoices, and the logic for all four is the same: you get a lot of emails that contain important information or links, but it can be difficult to find that information and those links. Gmail will comb through your emails for you and pull that information to the top.

These cards will appear at the top of individual emails but also at the top of search results – when you search “Delta” to find your flight, you will be shown the card for your upcoming flight so you don’t have to search through 100 confirmation emails to find on the right message – it’ll even put it right at the top of your inbox. If you have a package scheduled to arrive within the next couple of days or a flight is about to start, you may see the relevant cards appear as soon as you open Gmail, Guajardo says.

Adding these cards to users’ inboxes is likely to be the most controversial part of the new system. In general, people don’t like their inboxes being tampered with, a fact Google knows all too well. (RIP Inbox.) But Guajardo believes that if the cards are useful enough and easy to dismiss, people will appreciate having them front and center. “They won’t take up your entire inbox,” she says. “This is prime real estate.”

This isn’t a big new AI initiative, Guajardo says, nor does it tap into Gemini or any of Google’s vast stores of knowledge about you and the world. It’s just Gmail’s improvement at parsing your email for useful information within.

The new cards should now start appearing within individual messages on iOS and Android. For now, it will be for purchases only, but more categories and skins will be coming soon. While Google tries to help billions of people get to grips with their inboxes and takes into account the fact that email now includes a wide range of different things, it leans toward the idea that most emails aren’t messages. It’s information. And Google is very good at finding information.