Looker Studio is now Data Studio: what the 2026 rename means for your reports

When did Looker Studio become Data Studio?

Google announced on April 11, 2026, on the Google Cloud blog, that the product would be called Data Studio again. The change rolled out in mid-April, and the release note dated April 16, 2026 reads: We've rebranded Looker Studio as Data Studio.

This is the product's second name change. It launched as Google Data Studio in 2016, took the Looker name in October 2022, and returned to its original name in April 2026.

The rename did not happen in a single moment for every account. Some people saw the new name a few days before colleagues did, which is normal for a staged Google rollout. By the end of April 2026 the new branding was showing for everyone, and the old web address was already forwarding visitors to the new one.

Why did Google rename it back to Data Studio?

Google wants the name to reflect what the tool now does: visualize and explore content from Google Data Cloud. In Google's positioning, Data Studio is for self-service exploration and ad-hoc reporting, while Looker remains the enterprise BI platform built on governed semantic models.

In practice, sharing one brand made the two easy to confuse. I lost count of the calls where someone asked for a Looker project and meant a free dashboard, or the other way round. Separating the names makes those conversations simpler.

For people who build reports, the original name is also simply more accurate. The tool never required a Looker licence, never used a Looker semantic model, and has always been free to start. Calling it Data Studio again removes a source of confusion that cost buyers time and, now and then, money spent on the wrong product.

What changed and what stayed the same?

The name, the web address and the paid edition's name changed. Your work did not. Every report, data source, asset and user moved over automatically, so nobody had to export, rebuild or reconnect anything.

The editor itself works the way it did before. Calculated fields, CASE statements, parameters, blends, filters, themes and scheduled email delivery all behave the same, and a report you built in 2023 opens with every chart in place. The menus carry the new name, but nobody on your team needs retraining.

Do old links and bookmarks still work?

Yes. The old domain returns a 301 redirect to datastudio.google.com and deep links are preserved, so a bookmark to a specific report page lands on that same page under the new address.

Embedded reports on intranets or client portals keep working through the redirect too. Updating them is still worth doing at some point, simply so your source code and internal wiki use the current address.

Scheduled email deliveries are part of each report, so they moved over with everything else. Shared links work the same way: anyone who could open a report before the rename can open it now, through the redirect or the new address, without asking for access again.

What happened to the Pro edition?

The paid edition became Data Studio Pro with the same features. Pro costs $9 per user per project per month, varying with subscription length, and only creators, editors and managers in Pro workspaces need a licence. Viewers do not.

Pro is bought through the Google Cloud console or, since February 5, 2026, through the Workspace Admin console, and there is a 30-day free trial. It adds organisation-owned content tied to Cloud projects, team workspaces, up to 200 delivery schedules per report, hourly scheduling, Slack and Google Chat delivery, alerts and audit logging, among other things.

If your company already paid for the Pro edition, your licences, workspaces and settings carried across. Nothing needs to be repurchased. The only practical change is that admins will now find the product listed under its new name in the Cloud console and in billing.

Is Data Studio the same as Looker?

No. Data Studio and Looker are different products. Data Studio is a free self-service reporting tool that connects to sources such as GA4, Google Ads, Search Console, Sheets and BigQuery. Looker is an enterprise BI platform built around a governed semantic model.

For most marketing teams, founders and analysts, Data Studio is the right tool. Looker makes sense when a large organisation needs one controlled definition of every metric across many teams. If you were sold a Looker project when you asked for a dashboard, it is worth checking which product you actually need.

The rename actually makes this choice easier to explain inside a company. Data Studio is where analysts and marketers explore and share reports quickly. Looker is where a central data team defines metrics once and governs who sees what. Some organisations use both, with Looker for governed finance metrics and Data Studio for faster self-service reporting.

What else arrived in Data Studio in 2026?

The rename came with a run of features. Conversational Analytics, which lets people ask questions of their data through agents built in BigQuery and published to Data Studio, opened to all users on April 16, 2026 and became generally available on July 30, 2026.

Smaller additions include cross-data-source filtering in January, PNG export in February, viewer manual refresh in June, fullscreen charts in August, PostgreSQL private IP in September, and histogram charts. One deprecation to note: Google Ads location extension fields were sunset on May 4, 2026, so any chart using them needs a new field.

Conversational Analytics depends on agents set up in BigQuery, so it suits teams that already keep their data there. For a report fed only by Sheets or GA4, the classic charts and filters remain the main way people read the numbers.

Does the rename change connectors, limits or quotas?

No. The connectors and limits are the same as before the rename. Native connectors still cover GA4, Google Ads, Search Console, Sheets, BigQuery, YouTube, Campaign Manager 360, Display and Video 360, Ad Manager, Cloud SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and Redshift, and partner connectors such as Supermetrics or Windsor.ai keep working.

The limits that cause most support requests also stayed put. Blends still allow up to 5 data sources with equality joins only. Tables on fixed-schema sources like GA4 and Google Ads still cap at 10 dimensions and 20 metrics, and the GA4 Data API still allows 14,000 tokens per project per property per hour on standard properties, so busy reports can still hit quota errors.

If a report broke around April 2026, the rename is rarely the cause. In my experience it is usually an expired credential, a GA4 quota error or a deprecated field.

What should you do now that Looker Studio is now Data Studio?

Nothing breaks, so there is no emergency. A few small tasks keep your team and documentation tidy.

I would also use the moment as a reason for a light clean-up. Open your most-used reports, check who owns each data source, remove copies nobody looks at, and confirm that credentials belong to a company account. It takes an afternoon and prevents the classic problem of a report dying when one person leaves.

• Update internal docs, onboarding guides and bookmarks to datastudio.google.com.
• Replace old embed URLs in portals and websites when you next touch that code.
• Check charts that used Google Ads location extension fields, sunset on May 4, 2026.
• Consider Data Studio Pro if you need team workspaces, organisation-owned content or hourly scheduled delivery.
• Make sure key reports are owned by a company account rather than one employee, a good habit whatever the name.