Public Gemini Notebook Pages Are Filling Google Search With Spam
More than 12,000 public Gemini and NotebookLM notebook pages are showing up in Google Search, and a wave of them are spam for sex toys, peptides, coupons and similar offers. Google has since cleaned most of these pages out of its index, but the incident shows how quickly a new Google surface can turn into a parasite SEO playground.
What is happening with public notebook pages?
When a user creates a notebook in Gemini or NotebookLM and toggles on the public sharing option, Google can crawl and index that page. That is useful for students, researchers and teams who want to share a study guide or briefing. It also opens a door: spammers have been generating public notebooks packed with off-topic promotional text, then letting Google index them so the pages rank in search.
Reports shared on X put the count of indexed public notebook pages above 12,000. The categories observed inside the spam ranged from sex toys and adult content to peptides, coupon codes, app installs and other commercial offers. Each public notebook is essentially a free, crawlable web page hosted on a trusted Google domain, which makes it attractive to anyone building link farms or trying to piggyback on Google’s authority.
How are spammers using public notebooks?
The tactic is straightforward. A spammer creates a notebook, types a prompt that fills it with commercial copy and links, and publishes it as public. Google indexes the page. The notebook then shows up in regular web search results for queries related to whatever the prompt produced.
That pattern is what researchers call parasite SEO: publishing content on a high-authority platform so the platform’s ranking power carries the spam, instead of building a site of your own. NotebookLM and Gemini are not the first Google properties to be abused this way. Past launches have seen the same pattern repeat, because Google tends to ship the product first and deal with the abuse later.
What does the spam look like in search results?
Search result listings for the spammed notebooks show the notebook’s title and a snippet pulled straight from the prompt content. Readers can open the prompt that generated the notebook, which often makes the spam obvious. In many cases the prompt is little more than a keyword-stuffed instruction designed to produce a page that ranks for a commercial query.
For a user, the experience is jarring: a Gemini-branded page that looks like a research tool but actually delivers a coupon pitch, an adult offer or a peptide sales page. For a brand, the risk is that a competitor can park promotional content on a google.com subdomain and outrank a legitimate site with a fraction of the effort.
Why does this keep happening with new Google launches?
Each new public surface Google ships starts with a small set of indexed pages and few quality controls. Spammers often target these lightly protected pages and flood them with content shortly after launch. Google typically responds only after the abuse has grown large enough to attract widespread attention.
In this case, the cleanup happened about a day after the spam was first highlighted. Google removed the bulk of the shared notebook directory pages from search results. The faster response is welcome, but the pattern itself is the story: every public Google product with crawlable output is a candidate for the same abuse, and the playbook for the spammer rarely changes.
What does this mean for SEOs and site owners?
For anyone working in search, the incident is a reminder to monitor branded and Google-hosted SERPs for unexpected listings, especially after Google ships a new public product. A notebook page ranking above your own product page is not a sign that your SEO is broken; it is a sign that the platform is being abused.
For site owners, visibility on Google surfaces they do not control can shift overnight. A new Google property can hand a temporary ranking boost to whoever floods it first, then disappear just as fast.
FAQ
What is NotebookLM?
NotebookLM is Google’s notebook-style AI tool that lets users upload sources and generate summaries, study guides and answers grounded in those sources. Public notebooks are shared pages that Google can index and surface in search.
How many public notebook pages were indexed?
Reports shared on X put the count above 12,000 indexed public notebook pages at the peak of the spam wave, spanning topics from sex toys and adult content to peptides and coupon codes.
Has Google removed the spammed notebook pages?
Yes. About a day after the spam was flagged, Google removed the bulk of the shared notebook directory pages from its search results. The cleanup was confirmed in posts on X showing the SERPs cleared.
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