Google is so famous for killing products that there’s a whole virtual graveyard you can explore. Google’s latest shutdown now has a headstone of its own. Effective today, Google has discontinued the Tenor API, which you may not be familiar with by name. You’ve probably used it, though. Tenor is a database of searchable GIFs, which used to serve animated images to sites like X/Twitter, Discord, and more. Now, it only serves Google—maybe the headstone is a bit premature.
Like many Google products, Tenor started as an independent company. Google came along and bought Tenor in 2018, and it continued running it largely unchanged in the intervening years. Tenor was integrated into Google products like Gboard and Google Messages, but the API also gave other platforms a way to help users find, share, and save GIFs. It’s similar to services like Giphy and Klipy.
In January, Google announced it was going to start winding down that API access. It stopped accepting new integrations at that time, and the end date has now arrived: As of June 30, the Tenor API is no more. Google, a company with nearly 200,000 employees and more than $130 billion in 2025 profit, says it decided to stop supporting the image API so it could better focus its resources. The real problem was probably that Tenor was free, and Google didn’t see a way it could make money from a GIF API.
“As part of an ongoing effort to focus resources on enhancing our core products, we’ve made the decision to sunset the Tenor API on June 30, 2026,” the company explained.
To be clear, Tenor still exists. You can go to the Tenor website to search for GIFs, and Google’s apps will still source animated images from Tenor (for now). You may not have realized if you were using Tenor through Twitter or Discord, but any favorite GIFs you’ve saved there are gone. Most users didn’t understand easy GIF access was provided by a third-party API and have directed their resulting anger at the platforms themselves.
Websites that relied on Tenor have been shifting to alternatives over the last several weeks, so you can still get your GIF fix without tedious manual uploading. X’s Nikita Bier confirmed on June 20 that the site had migrated away from Tenor. Discord, meanwhile, has tested both Giphy and Klipy, but it looks like most users are seeing Klipy integration now. WhatsApp and Bluesky also appear to be moving to Klipy integration for GIFs.
Users of these websites will see a different selection of GIFs going forward, and not everyone is happy with the selection. Things could improve as more people use Tenor alternatives. Frank Nawabi, who founded Tenor and sold it to Google, is one of the folks behind Klipy. The startup recently raised $3.8 million in funding, and one of the investors was, you guessed it, Google.
