Google-NotebookLM
Google-NotebookLM does not crawl websites on its own: it only fetches a page when a specific user adds that URL as a source inside NotebookLM, Google's tool for summarizing and analyzing documents with AI. The action is always triggered by a person, not an automated system. According to Google's official documentation, this type of fetcher ignores robots.txt because access stems from an explicit user request. Its impact on your business's AI visibility is indirect and limited — it does not feed training data to models like Gemini or ChatGPT, but rather helps individual users analyze your content within their own projects.
- User-agent
Google-NotebookLM- Does it respect robots.txt?
- No — it ignores the rules
How to allow it in your robots.txt
User-agent: Google-NotebookLM
Allow: /How to block it (not recommended)
User-agent: Google-NotebookLM
Disallow: /Frequently asked questions
Should I block Google-NotebookLM?
For most businesses, there is little reason to block it. It only visits your site when a user explicitly adds your URL to their NotebookLM project, so the traffic is occasional and human-initiated. Blocking it also has no clear effect on your AI visibility, since this bot does not train the language models that answer questions about businesses like yours.
Does Google-NotebookLM affect whether my business appears in ChatGPT or Gemini?
Not directly. This fetcher does not feed large language model training pipelines. It downloads your page so that an individual user can analyze it inside their NotebookLM project. If you want to improve your visibility in AI-generated answers from Gemini or ChatGPT, the crawlers that matter are different ones, such as Googlebot or GPTBot.
How can I tell if Google-NotebookLM has visited my site?
Search for "Google-NotebookLM" in your server access logs or in your hosting or CDN dashboard — for example, in Cloudflare. Every visit is recorded with that name in the user-agent field. Expect infrequent hits, since each one depends on someone manually adding your URL to their project.