Google NotebookLM Rebrand May Expose Your Site To More AI Scraping

Google has up to date its checklist of Google user-triggered fetchers to replicate the Google Pocket book title change. Customers who’ve hardcoded the previous person agent for robots.txt or for different causes have a grace interval of some weeks earlier than the previous person agent stops working in August 2026.

Causes To Block Gemini Pocket book

Gemini Pocket book’s Uncover Sources function will scrape on-line articles with out the positioning proprietor’s permission. This function scrapes as much as ten sources for the person’s outlined question or subject, supplies an AI abstract, and generates no referrals.

Gemini Pocket book’s audio and video overview options repurpose on-line content material and switch it into an audio podcast or a video explainer. This output, if used on-line, can then compete towards the unique supply materials.

All of those methods of utilizing on-line content material to generate different types of content material are meant capabilities of Gemini Pocket book. It automates the method of scraping and creating one thing else from distinctive on-line content material with out attribution to the unique supply.

Website house owners who need to block Gemini Pocket book might want to replace their firewalls and .htaccess recordsdata to ensure that them to proceed working.

NotebookLM Is Now Gemini Pocket book

NotebookLM has rebranded to Gemini Pocket book. Gemini Pocket book is the very same factor. There is no such thing as a change to the way it works or what it does.

Gemini Pocket book is a analysis assistant that permits customers to add paperwork that may function the bottom fact and allow higher solutions, analysis, and studying utilizing the uploaded materials. Gemini Pocket book is multimodal, which means that it might work with YouTube and add audio recordsdata.

Gemini Pocket book’s multimodality additionally works within the different path. It will possibly flip uploaded paperwork into an audio or video podcast episode, which may be useful for studying a couple of subject.

Why The Gemini Pocket book Consumer Agent Is Vital

The half that’s significant for SEOs and web site house owners is that Gemini Pocket book can fetch internet pages and use them for the person’s analysis. This works by both the person pasting in URLs or through the use of the Uncover Sources function, which may automate the method of discovering articles and internet pages so as to add as sources for analysis.

The scrapers or crawlers utilized by Gemini Pocket book are categorized as user-triggered fetchers, and since they’re initiated by customers, they don’t obey robots.txt.

Nonetheless, a website proprietor can arrange a firewall rule to dam the user-triggered fetchers or create an .htaccess rule to do the identical.

Right here’s an instance of how one can do it:

RewriteEngine On

# Block Google-GeminiNotebook
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Google-GeminiNotebook [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F,L]

Venture Mariner Fully Disappears

Venture Mariner was retired in Might 2026 and Google’s documentation was up to date to replicate that.

The old documentation used to learn like this:

“Related merchandise Google-Agent is utilized by brokers hosted on Google infrastructure to navigate the net and carry out actions upon person request (for instance, Venture Mariner). It makes use of IP ranges from user-triggered-agents.json.””

The above part of the user-triggered fetcher documentation is in any other case the identical aside from the elimination of this half: (for instance, Venture Mariner).

Point out Of NotebookLM Eliminated

The opposite change of consequence is the whole elimination of Google NotebookLM from the documentation.

That is eliminated:

“Google NotebookLM
Consumer-Agent in HTTP requests Google-NotebookLM
Related merchandise The Google-NotebookLM fetcher requests particular person URLs that NotebookLM customers have offered as sources for his or her initiatives.”

The eliminated part has been changed with new documentation that displays the title change to Gemini Pocket book.

That is the new documentation:

“Gemini Pocket book

Consumer-Agent in HTTP requests Cellular agent

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; Okay) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Cellular Safari/537.36 (appropriate; Google-GeminiNotebook; +https://builders.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-gemininotebook)
Desktop agent

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (appropriate; Google-GeminiNotebook; +https://builders.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-gemininotebook)
Former agent (supported till August 2026) Google-NotebookLM
Related merchandise The Gemini Pocket book fetcher requests particular person URLs that Gemini Pocket book customers have offered as sources for his or her initiatives.”

As beforehand talked about, the Google-NotebookLM person agent will proceed to perform till August 2026.

The changelog explains:

“In case you hardcoded the previous worth in your code, replace the string to keep away from potential bugs. We’ll proceed to help the previous worth to permit for a clean transition.”

Takeaways

Google’s rebrand of NotebookLM to Gemini Pocket book is accompanied by an replace to its documentation. The brand new documentation removes the previous person agent (Google-NotebookLM) and replaces it with documentation particular to the brand new person agent (Google-GeminiNotebook).

Website house owners who use the previous person agent to trace or block Gemini Pocket book crawler and fetcher exercise have only some weeks to replace their firewalls or .htaccess recordsdata.

Consumer-triggered fetchers nonetheless don’t obey robots.txt. Robots.txt will not be a directive. A directive is one thing {that a} crawler should obey. So there isn’t a requirement for Gemini Pocket book’s crawler to obey it. However website house owners can nonetheless management entry to content material utilizing a firewall or an .htaccess file.

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