# Dust.tt: How to Connect Notion and Google Drive Data

*How-to — 2026-10-22 — by Mahmoud Zalt*

How to connect Notion and Google Drive to Dust.tt, who needs admin rights, how fast each source syncs, and what never gets indexed.

**Short answer.** **A workspace admin connects Notion and Google Drive from Spaces, then Connections, and picks exactly which pages or folders sync.** Dust recommends authorizing both with a dedicated admin account rather than someone's personal login. Nothing you sync is usable by your colleagues until it is added to a space they belong to.

**About this guide.** This guide is based on publicly available information and Dust's own documentation, checked on 17 August 2026. Sistava is not affiliated with Dust. Interfaces and pricing change often, so confirm the current steps in their documentation before you rely on them.

An agent in Dust is only as good as the knowledge behind it, and that knowledge arrives through connections. Dust calls these fully managed integrations, meaning they sync automatically once set up rather than needing a manual upload every week.

This guide covers the two sources most teams connect first, Notion and Google Drive, plus the parts that catch people out: who can authorize them, how long the first sync takes, and what Dust simply does not index.

One thing to settle before you start: this is admin work. Dust's documentation states that connections are managed by workspace admins, so if you are a builder without admin rights, your job here is to write the request, not click the buttons.

## What can you connect to Dust?

Dust's connections page lists twelve managed integrations: Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, Intercom, GitHub, Microsoft, Snowflake, BigQuery, Zendesk, Gong, Slack, and Salesforce. Beyond those, their data sources overview describes public websites through a crawler, folders for static files, and custom connections built on their API.

The pattern is the same across all of them. An admin authorizes the source, chooses precisely which parts of it to sync, and then decides which space that data lives in. Only then can anyone else use it.

**Syncing is not sharing.** Dust's admin quickstart is blunt about this: until you add the data to a space, it is not yet shared or usable by your workspace members. Connecting Notion and then wondering why nobody's agent can see it is the single most common first-week confusion.

## How do you connect Notion to Dust?

The connection has to be started by someone who is both a Notion admin and a Dust admin. Dust's documentation is explicit that only Notion admins can establish the connection, and it recommends provisioning a dedicated admin account for the job rather than using a personal one.

The reason is continuity. A connection authorized by an individual is tied to that individual's access, which becomes a problem the day they change teams or leave. A dedicated account keeps the connection stable and keeps control with whoever owns IT.

Once authorized, you get a Notion popup for choosing which workspace data to hand over at the teamspace level, then a Dust modal for selecting the exact pages to sync. Dust suggests a shared-by-default approach: share broadly and exclude the specific things you do not want indexed, using the top page selection when an entire section is safe to share.

### Connecting Notion, in order

1. **Confirm you hold both admin roles** — You need to be a Notion admin and a Dust admin. Dust recommends a dedicated admin account with access to every page and teamspace you intend to sync.
2. **Start the connection from Dust** — Connections live under Spaces, then Connections, and are set up by workspace admins.
3. **Choose teamspaces in the Notion popup** — Notion asks which workspace data Dust may see, at teamspace level.
4. **Select the exact pages in the Dust modal** — Narrow to the pages you actually want indexed. Use top page selection for whole sections that are fully shareable.
5. **Add or remove pages later from Notion** — From a Notion page, open the three dots menu, choose Connect to, and pick Dust. As the connection creator you should see the Dust icon listed under connections.
6. **Place the data in a space** — Open the space, choose Connected Data, then add data from connections, select what belongs there, and save.

A few Notion specifics are worth knowing before you promise your team a date. Dust's docs say the account making the connection needs at least commenting access to the pages being shared, that pages synced without their parent land in an orphaned resources folder, and that restricted pages or teamspaces will not be indexed at all.

They also list current limitations, including that databases with multiple data sources are not supported and that pages with unlinked share settings may not sync. Those are the sort of details that change, so check their Notion connection page before you build a plan around any of them.

If that felt like a lot of steps for one source, it is the honest cost of an indexing model that respects your existing permissions. It is also the reason a Sistava AI Employee works the other way round: you connect the account once and tell it what to look after, and it decides what it needs rather than waiting for a sync selection you have to maintain.

## How do you connect Google Drive to Dust?

Google Drive follows the same shape: authorize, then choose exactly what syncs. Dust again recommends a dedicated admin account rather than personal credentials, so that access is controlled centrally instead of by whoever happened to click the button.

The flow runs through an authorization prompt from Dust, a Google acknowledgment, a Google sign-in, a Google authorization screen, and finally a modal where you select the exact data to sync. One requirement is easy to miss: Dust's documentation says the authorizing account needs edit and download rights on the documents you expect to appear.

| Question | Google Drive | Notion |
|---|---|---|
| Who authorizes it | A workspace admin, ideally a dedicated admin account | Someone who is both a Notion admin and a Dust admin |
| How often it syncs | Every few minutes | Changes within synced parents are near immediate; new top pages refresh once a day |
| First sync on a large workspace | Drives above roughly 50,000 files can take over a day, sometimes several | Large workspaces can take several days |
| What you select | Specific folders and files in a selection modal | Teamspaces in Notion, then exact pages in Dust |
| Common blocker | The authorizing account lacks edit and download rights on a file | Restricted pages or teamspaces, which are not indexed |

On file types, Dust's Google Drive page lists Google Docs, Google Slides, docx, pptx, plain text, markdown, and PDFs that contain text. Excel files need converting to Google Sheets first, and their documentation also notes size ceilings, including a two megabyte text extraction limit per file and a cap of fifty thousand rows per sheet.

If a document you expected is missing from the Drive tree, their guidance points at download permissions first. That is a Google-side setting rather than a Dust bug, which is why it is worth checking before you open a support ticket.

## What does Dust not index?

Quite a lot, and knowing the list saves you from blaming the agent for a gap in the data. Dust's page on agent data access states that agents only see what admins chose to synchronize, then lists specific exclusions.

- **Images and comments. **Pictures and comments inside your Google documents and Notion pages are not available to agents, and Drive image files and folder titles are excluded too.
- **Most Slack extras. **Attachments, forwarded messages, bot-generated content, and links that do not point at an indexed document are outside what agents read.
- **Repository code. **For GitHub, Dust's documentation describes discussions and issues rather than the code in your repositories.

The practical habit is to ask a diagnostic question before assuming the agent is at fault. If an answer is missing, check whether the source document is actually in the synced selection, then whether it is in a space the person asking belongs to. Those two checks resolve most of it.

None of this is a criticism of Dust. Every tool that indexes company knowledge has to draw these lines, and Dust documents theirs more openly than most. It is just work that lands on a person, usually the same person, every time a new source appears.

The wiring work is the part we chose to remove at Sistava. Instead of connecting sources and mapping them to spaces, you hire an AI Employee that already has its tools connected, hand it the accounts it needs, and tell it in plain English what to look after. It asks when it is unsure rather than waiting to be configured.

## How do you keep connections healthy?

Treat the connection list as something with an owner and a review date. Dust's docs note that updates typically show up within a few minutes, so if something has been stale for a day, that is a signal rather than normal latency.

It also helps to keep the synced set deliberately small. Dust warns elsewhere that the more data an agent can reach, the lower the chance it retrieves the right thing, and that logic applies just as much to what you sync in the first place.

If you are staying with Dust, do the boring version well. Connect one source, sync a narrow selection, put it in one space, and prove an agent can answer from it before you add the next. A tidy connection list is worth more than a complete one.

## FAQ

### Who can connect Notion or Google Drive to Dust?

Workspace admins manage connections in Dust. For Notion specifically, the person setting it up must be a Notion admin as well as a Dust admin. Dust recommends provisioning a dedicated admin account for connections rather than using an individual's personal login, so access stays under IT control.

### How long does the first sync take?

It depends on size. Dust's documentation says a large Notion workspace can take several days for the initial sync, and a Google Drive with roughly fifty thousand files or more can take over twenty four hours and sometimes several days. After the first pass, Drive syncs every few minutes and Notion changes within already synced pages appear within seconds to minutes.

### Why can my colleague not see the data I connected?

Almost always because it has not been added to a space they belong to. Dust's admin quickstart states that connected data is not yet shared or usable by workspace members until it is added to a space. Connecting a source and sharing it are two separate actions.

### Which file types does the Google Drive connection support?

Dust lists Google Docs, Google Slides, docx, pptx, plain text and markdown files, and PDFs that contain text. Excel files need to be converted to Google Sheets first. Their documentation also describes size limits, including a two megabyte text extraction limit per file.

### Can Dust read comments and images in my documents?

No. Dust's page on agent data access states that pictures and comments inside Google documents and Notion pages are not available to agents, and that Drive images and folder titles are excluded as well. If important context lives in comments, move it into the document body.

### A Notion page is missing from Dust. Why?

Check three things in order. Whether the page is inside your synced selection, whether it or its teamspace is restricted, since Dust says restricted pages and teamspaces are not indexed, and whether it was synced without its parent, in which case Dust places it in an orphaned resources folder rather than losing it.

## Sources

- Dust documentation, [Connections](https://docs.dust.tt/docs/connections)
- Dust documentation, [Notion connection](https://docs.dust.tt/docs/notion-connection)
- Dust documentation, [Google Drive connection](https://docs.dust.tt/docs/google-drive-connection)
- Dust documentation, [What data do the agents have access to?](https://docs.dust.tt/docs/what-data-do-the-agents-have-access-to)
- Dust documentation, [Data sources overview](https://docs.dust.tt/docs/what-are-data-sources)
- Dust documentation, [Admin quickstart](https://docs.dust.tt/docs/quickstart-admin)
- Dust documentation, [Spaces management](https://docs.dust.tt/docs/data)

Connections are the least glamorous part of the setup and the part that decides whether anything else works. Get one source syncing cleanly into one space, prove it end to end, and the rest is repetition.

**Tags:** dust-tt, notion-integration, google-drive-integration, ai-data-sources, company-knowledge