Google has updated its list of Google user-triggered fetchers to reflect the Google Notebook name change. Users who have hardcoded the old user agent for robots.txt or for other reasons have a grace period of a few weeks before the old user agent stops working in August 2026.
Reasons To Block Gemini Notebook
Gemini Notebook’s Discover Sources feature will scrape online articles without the site owner’s permission. This feature scrapes up to ten sources for the user’s defined query or topic, provides an AI summary, and generates no referrals.
Gemini Notebook’s audio and video overview features repurpose online content and turn it into an audio podcast or a video explainer. This output, if used online, can then compete against the original source material.
All of these ways of using online content to generate other forms of content are intended functions of Gemini Notebook. It automates the process of scraping and creating something else from unique online content without attribution to the original source.
Site owners who want to block Gemini Notebook will need to update their firewalls and .htaccess files in order for them to continue working.
NotebookLM Is Now Gemini Notebook
NotebookLM has rebranded to Gemini Notebook. Gemini Notebook is the exact same thing. There is no change to how it works or what it does.
Gemini Notebook is a research assistant that enables users to upload documents that can serve as the ground truth and enable better answers, research, and learning using the uploaded material. Gemini Notebook is multimodal, meaning that it can work with YouTube and upload audio files.
Gemini Notebook’s multimodality also works in the other direction. It can turn uploaded documents into an audio or video podcast episode, which can be helpful for learning about a topic.
Why The Gemini Notebook User Agent Is Important
The part that is meaningful for SEOs and website owners is that Gemini Notebook can fetch web pages and use them for the user’s research. This works by either the user pasting in URLs or by using the Discover Sources feature, which can automate the process of finding articles and web pages to add as sources for research.
The scrapers or crawlers used by Gemini Notebook are categorized as user-triggered fetchers, and because they’re initiated by users, they do not obey robots.txt.
However, a site owner can set up a firewall rule to block the user-triggered fetchers or create an .htaccess rule to do the same.
Here’s an example of how to do it:
RewriteEngine On
# Block Google-GeminiNotebook
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Google-GeminiNotebook [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F,L]
Project Mariner Completely Disappears
Project Mariner was retired in May 2026 and Google’s documentation was updated to reflect that.
The old documentation used to read like this:
“Associated products Google-Agent is used by agents hosted on Google infrastructure to navigate the web and perform actions upon user request (for example, Project Mariner). It uses IP ranges from user-triggered-agents.json.””
The above section of the user-triggered fetcher documentation is otherwise the same except for the removal of this part: (for example, Project Mariner).
Mention Of NotebookLM Removed
The other change of consequence is the complete removal of Google NotebookLM from the documentation.
This is removed:
“Google NotebookLM
User-Agent in HTTP requests Google-NotebookLM
Associated products The Google-NotebookLM fetcher requests individual URLs that NotebookLM users have provided as sources for their projects.”
The removed section has been replaced with new documentation that reflects the name change to Gemini Notebook.
This is the new documentation:
“Gemini Notebook
User-Agent in HTTP requests Mobile agent
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-GeminiNotebook; +https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-gemininotebook)
Desktop agentMozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-GeminiNotebook; +https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-gemininotebook)
Former agent (supported until August 2026) Google-NotebookLM
Associated products The Gemini Notebook fetcher requests individual URLs that Gemini Notebook users have provided as sources for their projects.”
As previously mentioned, the Google-NotebookLM user agent will continue to function until August 2026.
The changelog explains:
“If you hardcoded the old value in your code, update the string to avoid potential bugs. We will continue to support the old value to allow for a smooth transition.”
Takeaways
Google’s rebrand of NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook is accompanied by an update to its documentation. The new documentation removes the old user agent (Google-NotebookLM) and replaces it with documentation specific to the new user agent (Google-GeminiNotebook).
Site owners who use the old user agent to track or block Gemini Notebook crawler and fetcher activity have only a few weeks to update their firewalls or .htaccess files.
User-triggered fetchers still do not obey robots.txt. Robots.txt is not a directive. A directive is something that a crawler must obey. So there is no requirement for Gemini Notebook’s crawler to obey it. But site owners can still control access to content using a firewall or an .htaccess file.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Drawlab19
