Google’s own AI research tool is now carrying the kind of spam Google penalizes elsewhere. Public reports built with Gemini Notebook, the renamed NotebookLM, are appearing in Google’s index promoting coupon codes, crypto refund offers and paid social-engagement services, according to a report Search Engine Watch (SEW) published September 21.
The pattern surfaced from two SEO practitioners’ posts. On September 19, one practitioner said his Gemini Notebook report started surfacing as an AI Overview citation in under 24 hours. A second practitioner posted a thread on September 21 with screenshots pointing to broader misuse: public notebooks built around discount codes, crypto refund schemes and backlink-building tools.
SEW ran that same search operator, site:https://notebook.google.com/notebook/, against Google without being logged in, on the same day. Results surfaced coupon promotions for e-bikes and peptide supplements, plus pages selling Instagram likes and access to private profiles, confirming those promotional pages sit in Google’s index.
One page SEW reviewed was a Polish-language report pushing an ENGWE e-bike discount code. It linked to the retailer through a referral identifier and included a table of coupon-keyword variants across several languages, carrying the standard Gemini Notebook disclosure that its content was AI-generated from user-supplied sources and instructions.
On the AI Overview claim, SEW located the report matching the first practitioner’s screenshot: a page recommending his AI SEO Rainmakers community over rival training resources. SEW was not able to independently reproduce the citation or confirm the 24-hour turnaround the practitioner described. That single image does not show why Google surfaced the page, nor whether the citation lasted.
That gap matters. A single unverified screenshot describes an outcome, not a mechanism, and Google has not said why a self-published promotional notebook would outrank or accompany independent sources in an AI Overview.
The tactic follows a familiar logic: publish on a Google-owned domain and borrow the trust that domain already carries. Public NotebookLM sharing, introduced in June 2025 for study guides and business manuals, gives that trust a new publishing surface.
Google’s spam policies do cover its own properties, though having a page live there, even with a referral link, isn’t by itself proof of a policy breach. The open question is enforcement mechanics, not policy scope.
A reply to the original post predicted Google would block crawling or add a noindex tag. Those tools behave differently. Blocking crawling through robots.txt is not the same as blocking indexing. The first can leave a URL already in the index visible in results even after crawling stops. The second, a noindex tag, only works once Google’s crawler reaches the page and reads that instruction, meaning the bot needs continued access, not less.
SEW reproduced one relevant detail: NotebookLM’s robots.txt address currently redirects to Google’s sign-in page under an ordinary unauthenticated request. SEW could not confirm what response Googlebot itself receives at that address, so whether the redirect actually blocks crawling remains unresolved.
A blanket noindex rule covering every public notebook would sweep up legitimate material too, study guides and business documents included, turning a narrow spam fix into a wider access decision. Teams tracking AI Overview citations for their own domains should watch whether notebook.google.com results persist or disappear over the next few weeks: that outcome will show whether Google treats this as a targeted spam fix or a platform-wide indexing change.
Search Engine Watch reported the NotebookLM parasite SEO findings on September 21, 2026.
