Your Google Pixel phone is getting a big notifications upgrade – but will it work?

Google is rolling out a new Notification Organiser feature to Pixel phones, which promises to make your notifications way smarter.

9to5Google has spotted Notification Organiser rolling out to the Google Pixel 9 and better (so no Pixel 9a, it seems) with the Android 16 QPR2 update. Once installed, it should be turned on by default.

You can check by heading to Settings > Notifications > Notification organiser. It’s only available to those with English set as the primary language, and even then only in Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, the UK, and the US.

What does Notification Organiser involve?

In this free upgrade, Notification Organiser will automatically arrange your incoming alerts into sub-categories. Promotions and News are active by default, but you can also opt into Social and Suggested.

With this categorisation system applied, you can opt to silence notifications coming in under one of these particular banners. You might want to stop what essentially amounts to promotional flyers (so prevalent around this time of year) from pinging you, or to keep a hyper-active social media feed in check (you popular thing, you).

It’s also possible to opt to “always expand bubbles” for a particular notification category, offering an instant look at incoming notifications of a particular sort.

The related Google support page indicates that AI is used in the processing of this Notification Organiser feature, which is why we’re being a little cautious over its true usefulness. AI hasn’t exactly had a great track record with notification management to date, as iPhone users will attest to.

This latest notification feature follows on from Google’s related AI summaries, which rolled out with the Android 16 QPR2 just last week.