Spammers get NotebookLM pages indexed

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 the notebooks contain#

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 reshared the findings, summarized them 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. Gagan Ghotra’s description on X was that black hat SEOs are leveraging public NotebookLMs being indexable by Google as a new parasite SEO tactic. The sources do not say why the pages ranked or how much trust they inherited, so we do not claim a mechanism.

Who found it, and Google’s reply#

Charles Floate first spotted the abuse on X. Gagan Ghotra wrote about it, and Glenn Gabe reshared it with further examples of spammed public notebooks in Google’s index. Search Engine Roundtable reported Google had indexed over 12,000 of these spam pages and had not removed them. An update to that report says that the next day Google removed all of these pages from its index, with Gabe saying Google “nuked the shared notebook directory from the SERPs”.

What Google could do about it#

Schwartz’s assessment is that the spam “won’t last long”, but he is critical of the timing: “Google should have a process for this for new launches by now.” Google did act: per the update to his report, the pages were removed from the index the next day.