AI Podcasts Power Huge Growth for Google’s NotebookLM

Google’s NotebookLM AI tool organizes notes and source data into chat responses, annotated documents, and podcasts with synthetic narrators

Of the many ways Google is seeking to compete with AI innovation, its NotebookLM is the latest to have captured imaginations, particularly since it gained the ability to organize its output into podcasts. With the addition of that feature in early September, traffic increased nearly 300% compared with the previous month.

NotebookLM users can upload content, import Google Docs or web pages, or write notes to create a body of knowledge, then use chatbot-style interactions to tease insights out of that material or organize it into an essay. All this is powered by Google’s Gemini AI platform. NotebookLM is intended as sort of a souped-up Evernote, but it’s also more than that.

The podcast feature takes a generated notebook and organizes it into a two-person dialog, with synthetic voices talking through the most interesting aspects of the information. This week, Google dropped the “experimental” label from NotebookLM and gave users the ability to “play producer” on the podcast output, steering what information the fictitious hosts should focus on.

Key takeaways

• Following its launch in 2023, NotebookLM had a few hundred thousand monthly users to notebooklm.google.com for most of the last year but really started to take off in the summer of 2024 (3.3 million in June, a little less in July and August). In September, it attracted 10.5 million visits.
• For comparison, gemini.google.com got 247.3 million visits in September, and chagpt.com got 3.1 billion.
• NotebookLM users spent 6.4 minutes per visit with the app, on average, compared with 6.2 minutes for ChatGPT and 5 for Gemini.

Rapid growth in September

Here’s the hockey-stick growth NotebookLM saw in September.

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