Google Renames NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook, Adds a Cloud Computer That Writes and Runs Code

NotebookLM is gone, at least as a name. Google announced on Thursday that its AI research and notetaking tool is now called Gemini Notebook, folding one of the company's most quietly successful products more tightly into the Gemini brand while pushing it deeper into both Search and coding workflows.

The rebrand comes with real functional changes, not just a new logo. The headline addition is a connection to a secure cloud computer that lets Gemini Notebook write and execute code on a user's behalf, turning a tool built for summarizing documents and generating podcast-style audio into something closer to an analytical workbench. Google says this new system beats its predecessor in internal comparisons more than 65 percent of the time, and that the win rate climbs to 78.2 percent on advanced web research tasks, a meaningful jump for anyone using the tool to synthesize large sets of sources rather than just chat with a single document.

Access to the feature is uneven for now. Google AI Ultra subscribers and Workspace business customers get it first, with a broader rollout to Pro-tier users on the web promised over the coming weeks. That staggered release pattern is familiar from other recent Gemini features and suggests Google is still tuning the compute costs of letting an AI assistant spin up and run its own code environment at scale.

The other major shift ties Gemini Notebook to Google Search. Notebooks created in the app will now surface inside AI Mode, the conversational search experience Google has been expanding throughout 2026. That integration sits alongside a separate move to open AI Mode to third-party apps, with Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music among the first partners plugging in starting this week in the US. Google says Gemini Notebook itself will stay a standalone app rather than being absorbed entirely into Search or the main Gemini assistant, even as the boundaries between the three products blur.

The scale behind this rebrand is notable. VP Josh Woodward says roughly 30 million people now use Gemini Notebook, with adoption inside more than 600,000 organizations. That is a substantial base for a product that began as an experiment: Google first showed it publicly as Project Tailwind in May 2023 before releasing it broadly under the NotebookLM name later that year. The tool built its reputation on features like AI-generated podcasts, narrated slideshows, and short vertical video clips distilled from a user's notes, capabilities that remain intact under the new name.

Renaming a tool with tens of millions of users carries some risk to brand recognition, but Google appears to be betting that consistency across its Gemini-branded lineup, paired with genuinely new capabilities like code execution, outweighs the cost of asking users to relearn a name.