Chrome Could Soon Autofill Your Gmail OTP Codes so You Don’t Have To

Chrome may soon stop making you hunt for verification codes in Gmail: a new experiment could let the browser fetch one-time-passwords (OTPs) from your inbox and offer them through Autofill.

What makes this interesting is that both sides are Google products: Gmail receives the OTP message, while Chrome handles the website where you need to enter the code. Instead of switching to Gmail to find, copy, and paste a verification code, Chrome could retrieve the relevant OTP and offer it through Autofill.

The feature is currently being tested behind a new flag called “Enable Gmail OTP Autofill,” which is exposed in Chrome Canary for Mac, Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS. The flag description says it enables the retrieval and filling of one-time passwords received in Gmail.

A Chromium commit spotted by Windows Report gives us a better idea of what Google has planned. The change adds the kAutofillGmailOtp feature flag, which will be used to guard Gmail OTP retrieval, dark-launch latency metrics, and, eventually, Autofill suggestions.

Google is also measuring the performance of the Gmail-to-Chrome retrieval process as it works on the Autofill experience.

It could work like this: when a website asks for a verification code, Chrome could retrieve a matching OTP from Gmail and present it as an Autofill suggestion. We still don’t know how Chrome will match an OTP to the right login. So it is too early to say how Chrome will determine which Gmail message belongs to a particular login attempt.

The dark-launch latency metrics suggest Google is measuring the retrieval process as it develops the feature. The commit also says Autofill suggestions will come “eventually,” so the current flag does not yet provide a complete Gmail OTP Autofill experience.

Google could therefore take some time to develop and test the feature before it becomes functional in Chrome Canary, let alone reaches the stable browser.

For now, the experiment suggests a tighter Gmail–Chrome connection that could remove the need to open Gmail, copy a verification code, and switch back to the website to paste it.