Reduce friction and latency for long-running jobs with Webhooks in Gemini API

Source: Google Date: 2026-05-04 URL: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/event-driven-webhooks/

Summary

Google added push-based webhook support to the Gemini API, replacing polling as the mechanism for tracking long-running operations (Deep Research, video generation, batch inference). Webhooks follow the Standard Webhooks spec with cryptographic signing and at-least-once delivery with 24-hour retry windows. Configuration is available globally per project or overridden per request.

Implications

• Agentic workflow reliability: Push completion signals are a prerequisite for durable agent orchestration — polling is brittle at the multi-minute timescales that real agent tasks operate on. This closes a gap that made Gemini API less viable for production agent loops.
• Ecosystem convergence: Anthropic’s async batch API and OpenAI’s background run endpoints are solving the same problem; Google’s webhook approach is the most explicit about the infrastructure contract (signing, retry policy). Watch for this pattern to become table-stakes across model APIs.
• Feeds the long-running tasks thread: signals that vendor infra is maturing toward agentic workloads that outlast HTTP request timeouts — relevant for any persistent-agent architecture.