Google decommissioned the Tenor API — the GIF search and share service behind GIF pickers across the web — on 30 June 2026, terminating all API and Ads Distribution Agreements and ending third-party access with no official replacement

Google decommissioned the Tenor API on 30 June 2026. Tenor was the GIF search-and-share service that powered the GIF picker in a large slice of the internet — Discord, X/Twitter, WhatsApp, Bluesky, Slack apps, chat clients and bots — through a simple search API. Third-party access to that API is now gone.

Google’s official support notice gives two dates:

• 13 January 2026 — Tenor stopped accepting new API key sign-ups and new integrations.
• 30 June 2026 — “Any API or Ads Distribution Agreements you have with Tenor will be terminated” and “current integrations that use the Tenor API will be fully decommissioned.”

Tenor didn’t disappear — only third-party API access did

The confusing part is that Tenor is still very much alive. Google kept Tenor content working inside its own products — Gboard, Tenor.com, the Android and iOS GIF Keyboard, and the Google Chat and Google Messages integrations. What went away is the ability for other apps to call the API. So end users still see GIFs in Google’s keyboards while the same GIF picker in a third-party app quietly returns nothing.

Where this bites

The failure mode is silent. Code that calls tenor.googleapis.com/v2 (or the legacy g.tenor.com/v1 / api.tenor.com/v1) keeps running — it just stops getting results, so the picker shows an empty grid or an error rather than crashing loudly. If you shipped an app or bot with a Tenor-backed GIF feature and haven’t touched it recently, it may already be broken.

Note that media URLs on media.tenor.com and c.tenor.com are content delivery, separate from the API — an embedded GIF you already have a URL for may still load, but you can no longer search for new ones.

What to do

There is no official Google replacement. To find every place you need to change, grep for the API hosts (tenor.googleapis.com, g.tenor.com/v1, api.tenor.com/v1) and any TENOR_API_KEY. The most common migration is to the GIPHY Developers API, which provides comparable search, trending and share endpoints — under its own key-approval, rate limits and attribution rules. Klipy and self-hosted GIF sets are alternatives where a full search API is more than you need. Treat it as a real integration swap and test the picker end to end.

The lastcall CLI fingerprints the three dead Tenor API hosts, so a repo still calling the decommissioned API surfaces as a warning in your terminal — without flagging the still-live media.tenor.com content URLs.