Google adds featured notebooks on selected topics to NotebookLM

Google is adding what it calls "featured notebooks" to NotebookLM as a way to demo its AI-powered software and offer interactive, high-quality resources on everything from personal advice to William Shakespeare. The company tried something similar after its developer conference in May, when it created a NotebookLM notebook trained on everything that was announced at Google I/O 2025.

The new featured notebooks have their own dedicated tab on the NotebookLM homepage and were created in partnership with "respected authors, researchers, publications and nonprofits around the world," Google says. Like all NotebookLM projects, you can interact with the raw sources that make up the notebook's knowledge base, ask questions about topics in a chat interface or view an AI-generated summary, audio overview or flow chart for more ways to interact with the content.

The first round of featured notebooks included a notebook on longevity advice trained on the book Super Agers, a notebook on 2025 predictions trained on The Economist's annual "The World Ahead" report and an advice notebook trained on The Atlantic's "How to Build a Life" column, among several other options. Your mileage may vary on how useful each featured notebook is — I found the Shakespeare notebook to be the most fun to play with — but each is a good representation of the quality and volume of material that needs to be uploaded to NotebookLM for it to work well.

Google introduced NotebookLM in 2023 as an experiment in building an AI tool that relies on sources you upload, rather than whatever the company managed to scrape off the internet. The idea is that chats about topics in NotebookLM would be less prone to hallucinations than what an AI Overview in Google Search spits out. Or at the very least, it would be easier to check the AI's answers because the source material is a click away.

NotebookLM became really popular when Google introduced Audio Overviews in September 2024, AI-generated podcasts about the material uploaded to a NotebookLM notebook. Since then, the company has expanded the tool at a rapid clip, introducing mobile apps and the ability to share public notebooks. Clearly, Google is committed to NotebookLM and featured notebooks are a further attempt to model how the AI-powered tool can actually be useful.

Google says featured notebooks are available to people using the desktop version of NotebookLM today and more featured notebooks will be added in the future.

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