Google-GeminiNotebook

Operator

Google Inc.

Type

AI Assistant

Official page

developers.google.com

robots.txt token

NotebookLM

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

NotebookLM is an AI-powered research and note-taking assistant that helps users synthesize information from their own uploaded sources, such as documents, transcripts, or web content. It can generate summaries, answer questions, and highlight key themes from the materials you provide, acting like a personalized research companion built on Google's Gemini model. NotebookLM fetches source URLs when users add them to their notebooks, enabling the AI to access and analyze those pages for context and insights.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: AI Assistants

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from Google-GeminiNotebook carry user agents like these:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-GeminiNotebook; +https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-gemininotebook)

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-GeminiNotebook; +https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-gemininotebook)

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

(Google-(?:GeminiNotebook|NotebookLM))

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow Google-GeminiNotebook

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: NotebookLM
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

How Vireo counts Google-GeminiNotebook

Vireo keeps requests from Google-GeminiNotebook out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under AI crawlers, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Because it's an AI crawler, its requests also count toward the pages AI crawlers took, which Vireo shows next to the readers AI assistants sent back. See how the AI assistants card works.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Google-GeminiNotebook's user agents.

Sources

• Google-GeminiNotebook information page (developers.google.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)