Preparing a Live Session
Press it early — it prepares, it does not start.
A live webinar needs a meeting for people to join. You do not create one yourself or paste a link in — Go Live does it for you.
The name is misleading. Go Live prepares the session; it does not begin it.
Steps
Set the date, time and timezone first
The recording is arranged relative to your start time, so the schedule needs to be right before you prepare the meeting.
Press Go Live, comfortably ahead of time
A day before is fine. It creates the Google Meet space, arranges for the session to be recorded and transcribed, and moves the webinar from Draft to Scheduled.
Share the registration page, not the meeting link
Attendees who register are taken to the meeting at the right moment, and their attendance is recorded on the way through. Someone given the raw meeting link arrives as an unknown name with no attendance record.
Open the console when it is time
On the day, the presenter console is where you start the conference and follow who is in the room.
Result
The webinar reads Meet Ready on the list and sits in Scheduled until the conference is detected as having begun, at which point it becomes Live Now on its own.
Recording and transcription are arranged automatically for every live webinar. There is no switch to forget — a webinar exists to be recorded.
Troubleshooting
That is correct until the conference actually starts. Scheduled means the meeting exists and is waiting.
A live webinar still runs if the recording could not be arranged — the session is never blocked for it, and the failure is not shown on screen. If the recording matters, confirm one exists rather than assuming it does.
Check the Setup column on My Webinars. Meet Ready means it worked. The visible change is the badge and the status, not a new window.
