Looker

Looker is Google Cloud's enterprise BI platform, acquired by Google in 2019 for $2.6 billion. It takes a different approach to business intelligence — rather than connecting directly to data and building charts, Looker centers on LookML, a modeling layer that defines business metrics semantically.

The LookML Modeling Approach

In Looker, a data analyst (or data engineer) defines business metrics in LookML: what "revenue" means, how to calculate "customer lifetime value," what the "active users" metric includes. Once defined, these metrics are available to any user across any report or dashboard — consistent, governed, and always calculated the same way. This eliminates the problem of different teams calculating the same metric differently.

Gemini in Looker (Conversational Analytics)

Google's Gemini AI is integrated throughout Looker under the current product name Conversational Analytics (earlier previews used "Gemini in Looker" and "Looker Assistant" branding):

• Conversational analytics: Ask questions in natural language, get visualizations
• Chat-based follow-up: Iterative, multi-turn analysis on top of a query
• Formula suggestions: AI suggests LookML expressions and calculated fields
• Insight summaries: AI-generated narratives for dashboards
• Anomaly detection: Automatic alerts when metrics deviate from expected patterns

Embedded Analytics

Looker's embedded analytics allows companies to build data products on top of Looker's infrastructure — serving analytics to their customers through their own product UI. Many SaaS companies power their reporting features with Looker.

Google Cloud Integration

Looker integrates natively with BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, and the broader Google Cloud ecosystem. For companies already on GCP, Looker is the natural BI choice.

Pricing

Looker no longer publishes flat per-tier pricing. It is sold across three editions — Standard, Enterprise, and Embed — each requiring an annual commitment quoted directly by Google Cloud sales; the previously published ~$5,000/month Standard list price has been withdrawn from the public pricing page. Conversational Analytics is included with unlimited usage (within fair-use limits) through September 30, 2026, after which it shifts to metered "data token" billing (roughly $3 per million input tokens, $20 per million output tokens).