The topic Google’s silence on NotebookLM at I/O proves why people don’t trust their… is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
WWDC is just days away, and despite being a die-hard Apple fan, the tech event I was looking forward to most this year was Google I/O. I knew it was going to be a keynote with the word “AI” mentioned an absurd amount of times. However, I put all that aside because Google’s AI efforts have been something I’ve openly rooted for. But it wasn’t AI Overviews, AI Mode in Search, Gemini (or whatever Bard was), or Gemini in Google Maps plus every other Google app, that pulled me in. It was NotebookLM.
Of all the AI products Google has shipped, retired, rebranded, and re-shipped, NotebookLM is the one that felt like a real product made by people who actually used it. I’ve written an insane number of articles about it, rely on it extensively, and I’m constantly talking about it to anyone that will listen. Naturally, I sat down for the Google I/O keynote with one simple expectation: show me what’s next for the one Google AI product I actually love. And then… almost nothing.
In fact, NotebookLM was first debuted at Google I/O back in 2023 under the name Project Tailwind, and got a proper spotlight at I/O 2025 with the launch of Video Overviews and standalone mobile apps. The precedent was there. And yet, when the keynote wrapped, the most NotebookLM got was a passing mention as the engine behind Literature Insights, a science research tool the company announced at I/O. That was…it.
Ironically enough, Google decided to create a public NotebookLM notebook summarizing everything announced at I/O 2026 to help you catch up on an event where NotebookLM itself was barely worth catching up on.
You don’t need to keep constant tabs on Google to know the direction they like taking their products in. If something works, it eventually gets folded into something bigger. Right now, that something bigger is Gemini, and what happened at Google I/O paired with the moves Google has been making over the last few months has me worried that NotebookLM might be next.
Back in April, Google rolled out a “Notebooks” feature inside the Gemini app. This is positioned as dedicated project spaces where you can organize chats, files, and custom instructions, all syncing bidirectionally with NotebookLM. I covered this feature at XDA back when it launched, and even back then, I mentioned that I wasn’t sure I liked the direction NotebookLM seemed to be heading in. I mentioned that Google was drifting too far from everything that made the tool special in the first place. Despite that, I kept hoping I was wrong (and I’m still hoping).
Google will tell you they’re complementary — Gemini handles the reasoning, NotebookLM handles grounded research, and it’s just two apps sharing one brain. And maybe that’s true today. But when a product’s signature capabilities start showing up inside the company’s flagship AI platform, and then that same product barely gets acknowledged at the company’s biggest event of the year, it gets hard not to read the room.
There’s literally a website called Killed by Google dedicated to tracking every product the company has discontinued, and at this point, the list is long enough to make anyone hesitant about getting too attached to a Google product (no matter how good it may be).
Given that NotebookLM spent months as an experiment in Labs, then graduated from it and became a full-fledged product and is where it is today, I don’t really think it’ll get killed off. But what I covered in the section above does seem plausible. NotebookLM could stop being its own thing, and just become a tab inside Gemini.
All that said, we might be reading too much into a single keynote. NotebookLM is still getting updates (the team announced Google Drive sync a few days ago), and leaks suggest that exciting features are being worked on. Perhaps the absence from the keynote stage was just a sign that Google had too many other things to show off and NotebookLM didn’t make the cut for time.