Google · Answers
Google-NotebookLM
Read this entry as a migration notice rather than a crawler description. Google's crawling changelog records, on 2026-07-16, that the NotebookLM user agent was updated to `Google-GeminiNotebook`, with the accompanying instruction to update the string anywhere the old value was hardcoded. The fetchers page now carries a section headed Gemini Notebook, and `Google-NotebookLM` survives on it only as the *Former agent* row: Google states the old agent is supported until August 2026, which is the month you are reading this in. The mechanism underneath is unchanged: adding a source to a notebook still pulls exactly one URL, once. Only the identity on the request is being retired.
- Operated by
- Purpose
- Answers
- robots.txt token
- Google-NotebookLM
- Verification
- IP verified
Fetches a page in real time to answer a question someone just asked.
How to verify Google-NotebookLM
Google publishes the IP ranges Google-NotebookLM crawls from, and we fetch that list on a schedule. A request claiming to be Google-NotebookLM can therefore be checked against 2,163 published ranges: one that does not match is not this crawler.
Published ranges last confirmed by us on .
Google documents reverse-DNS verification: a genuine request resolves to a hostname under .gae.googleusercontent.com or .google.com that forward-resolves back to the same address.
User agent
Google has not published a full user-agent string for Google-NotebookLM. Requests are identified by the Google-NotebookLM product token appearing in the User-Agent header; we match that token rather than a whole string, because the rest of the header varies and matching it would miss real traffic.
robots.txt for Google-NotebookLM
No, and the rename does not disturb that: the class rule for user-triggered fetchers (generally ignoring robots.txt, because a person rather than a scheduler initiated the request) applied to this token and applies to its successor. What the rename changes is not whether a rule is obeyed but which string a rule has to name to describe anything Google still runs.
Block
User-agent: Google-NotebookLM
Disallow: /Allow
User-agent: Google-NotebookLM
Allow: /robots.txt is a request, not an enforcement mechanism. It is honoured by convention, and a crawler that ignores it is stopped at your edge, not in a text file.
What blocking Google-NotebookLM costs you
The question worth answering here is not whether to block but what an existing rule keyed on this token is still worth. Two things blunt it: user-triggered fetchers are documented as generally ignoring robots.txt in the first place, and the string itself is being withdrawn. Google gives a support window that ends this month and says nothing about what happens on the far side of it (it neither promises that the old token keeps being honoured nor states that it stops), so a `user-agent: Google-NotebookLM` group should be treated as expiring rather than as carried over, and the same goes for WAF signatures, log parsers and analytics filters that match only this string. Whatever posture you hold, restate it under `Google-GeminiNotebook`, and keep the old string matched for as long as stale traffic still arrives bearing it.