Since Josh Woodward took the helm of the Gemini team, Google has been pushing forward with powerful AI-driven consumer tools. One of its most notable achievements is the release of the Gemini 2.5 Pro model, which has been widely praised and is now available to free Gemini users albeit with some rate limitations. Building on that momentum, Google has now introduced the Deep Research AI agent, powered by the advanced Gemini 2.5 Pro model.
That said, Deep Research using Gemini 2.5 Pro is exclusive to Gemini Advanced subscribers. Free users can still access the Deep Research agent, but it runs on the more lightweight Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking model. While both are designed for reasoning tasks, the 2.5 Pro model offers deeper world knowledge and generally delivers more accurate, insightful results.
In a recent blog post, Google revealed that human evaluators preferred Gemini’s Deep Research agent over ChatGPT’s by a margin of more than 2 to 1. In my own comparison between the Gemini and ChatGPT, I also found myself leaning toward Gemini, as its responses consistently included up-to-date information on the topics I tested.
It’s worth noting that my initial tests were conducted using the older Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking model. With the introduction of Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google is now positioned to deliver significantly stronger results in Deep Research tasks. However, one key feature still remains absent from Gemini’s Deep Research agent.
Currently, you can’t upload files such as PDFs when using the agent in Gemini. In contrast, ChatGPT’s Deep Research supports PDF uploads, including paywalled scientific journals, allowing it to draw from a broader and often more authoritative knowledge base. This gives ChatGPT an edge in use cases requiring deeper, document-based insights. Hopefully, Google will address this limitation in future updates.
On the bright side, Gemini now supports Audio Overviews, essentially AI-generated podcast summaries of your research report similar to what’s available in NotebookLM making content digestion even more accessible.
