Spammers are getting NotebookLM public pages indexed by Google

Public Gemini NotebookLM notebooks are being turned into a spam distribution channel, and Google is indexing the results. Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reports that black hat SEOs are treating NotebookLM’s indexable public pages as a new parasite SEO tactic, publishing spam content inside notebooks and letting Google’s crawler do the rest.

What is actually in the spammed notebooks#

The compromised public notebooks carry promotions for sex toys, pornography, peptides, coupon codes and mobile applications, according to Schwartz’s report. None of it is notebook content in any legitimate sense. Glenn Gabe, who documented examples independently, summarized what he found this way: public Gemini Notebooks are being spammed, “from peptides to discount codes to porn to apps.”

Why this works as parasite SEO#

Parasite SEO means publishing content on someone else’s trusted, already-indexed domain instead of building authority on a new one. A public NotebookLM notebook is indexable by design, since Google built NotebookLM to let users share notebooks as public pages. That same design choice is what spammers are exploiting: a spam page hosted under notebooklm.google.com or a related Gemini domain inherits whatever trust and crawl priority Google already gives that domain, which a freshly registered spam site would not get.

Who found it, and what Google has done#

Charles Floate first spotted the abuse on X. Gagan Ghotra and Glenn Gabe then documented further examples of spammed public notebooks turning up in Google’s index. Search Engine Roundtable reports Google has indexed over 12,000 of these spam pages and, as of the report, had not removed them.

What Google could do about it#

Schwartz’s assessment is that the spam “won’t last long” once Google acts, but he is critical of the timing: “Google should have a process for this for new launches by now.” The underlying fix is not novel. Google already has mechanisms for policing spam on other user-generated, publicly indexable surfaces it hosts, such as Google Sites and Google Groups. Applying the same review or rate-limiting logic to public NotebookLM notebooks before they are crawled, rather than after thousands are already indexed, is the gap this incident exposes.