Content & Documents · Integration
Google Drive
Add Google Drive to your product for your customers, and give your AI agents governed access to it.
The Google Drive API splits a file into two things fetched in completely different ways: the metadata record, which is cheap and searchable, and the bytes behind it, which are not. Most of the work in a Drive integration is deciding which of those you actually need. Search is a query language of its own over name, mime type, parents and modified time. Native Docs, Sheets and Slides files hold no downloadable bytes at all and have to be exported to a format you name. Anything past a few megabytes wants a resumable upload rather than a single request. And staying current is a changes feed rather than a poll: you take a start page token, then ask what moved since, which is the only approach that survives a customer whose shared drive holds hundreds of thousands of files. Sharing stays where the customer set it, so a connected account reaches exactly what that person could reach in the Drive interface.
In your product
Embedded for your customers. Per-tenant auth, no per-customer code, maintained by fastn.
Let a customer authorise their own Drive so your product can browse My Drive and the shared drives they belong to, without you holding a copy of anything.
Search by mime type, parent folder and modified time rather than listing a drive and filtering it in your own code.
Export a native Docs, Sheets or Slides file to a format your product can parse, since those files have no bytes to download.
Keep a start page token per customer and read the changes feed, so a drive with hundreds of thousands of files is never re-listed.
For your AI agents
Governed, audited access for the agents you build, through the MCP server.
An agent finds the file behind a question by querying metadata first and fetching bytes only when it needs them.
An agent uploads a generated file to the folder a customer nominated, and the folder it landed in is recorded.
An agent reports which revision of a document is current and who last touched it.
Example prompt
Find the newest version of this proposal in our shared drives and tell me what changed since the copy I read last month.
Set up Google Drive in 4 steps
- 01Enable the Google Drive connector in your fastn dashboard.
- 02Have each customer authorise their own Google account with OAuth, so their existing sharing decides what your product can open.
- 03Choose the drives and folders your product works in, decide which native formats you export to, and store a start page token per customer.
- 04Call it from your product and expose the same connection to your agents through the MCP gateway.
Why teams use the Google Drive integration
What you get by embedding it with fastn instead of building it yourself.
- Ship a Google Drive integration without building it. Your customers connect their own Google Drive account inside your product and work their files, documents and versions there, with no per-customer code on your side.
- Handle the part that actually costs time: permissions and versioning are easy to get subtly wrong, and mistakes expose content. fastn owns the auth, token refresh, rate limits, pagination and breaking-change fixes, so a Google Drive update is not your on-call problem.
- One integration serves your product and your agents. The same governed Google Drive connection powers in-product features and gives AI agents scoped, audited access, so you let your product work with your customers' documents in place without wiring it twice.
Used by these teams
Compare with
Google Workspace
Dropbox
BoxOften used alongside
Tools the same teams tend to run next to Google Drive, across other categories.
Shopify
Stripe
Jira
AsanaGoogle Drive integration FAQ
How do I add a Google Drive integration to my product?
Enable the Google Drive connector in your fastn dashboard, then let each customer authenticate their own Google Drive account. fastn handles the OAuth flow, token storage and refresh per tenant, so there is no Google Drive client code in your app and no per-customer branch in your codebase. Setup is 4 steps.
Do my customers each connect their own Google Drive account?
Yes. Every connection is scoped to the individual customer, so each authorises their own Google Drive account and only ever sees their own files, documents and versions. That per-tenant isolation is the point of an embedded integration: you support the long tail of customer setups without maintaining an integration per customer.
Can AI agents use this Google Drive integration?
Yes. The same connection is exposed to your agents through the fastn MCP gateway, with permissions scoped per tenant and every call audited. An agent finds the file behind a question by querying metadata first and fetching bytes only when it needs them.
Who maintains the Google Drive integration?
fastn does. When Google Drive changes an endpoint, deprecates a field or alters its auth, the fix lands in the connector rather than in your backlog, and your customers' connections keep working.
Whose permissions does the Google Drive integration run under?
Each customer's own Google Drive grant. Where Google Drive holds a library, their existing folder and item permissions apply and your product cannot reach content the connected account could not reach itself. Where it processes content you supply rather than storing it, the call runs under that customer's own credentials and is logged per tenant.
Can my product create or update content in Google Drive automatically?
Where Google Drive supports writes, documents, entries and assets can be created, updated and filed from your product or by an agent within scoped permissions, with each action logged. Where it is a read surface, the same connection serves reads only.
What can I build with the Google Drive integration?
A common starting point: let a customer authorise their own Drive so your product can browse My Drive and the shared drives they belong to, without you holding a copy of anything. Teams also use it for the other use cases listed above, and expose it to agents for governed reads and writes.
How much does the Google Drive integration cost?
It is included. Pricing is based on connected accounts, not on how many connectors you enable, so adding Google Drive does not change your per-connector cost. You can start free with 3 connected accounts.
Add Google Drive to your product
Start free with 3 connected accounts. No sales call required, and no per-customer integration code.