Google has officially rebranded NotebookLM as Gemini Notebook, folding it fully into the Gemini product family. At first glance, this looks like a cosmetic change: the words "language model" are gone from the name, and the logo is getting a fresh coat of the signature blue-to-purple Gemini gradient. The app itself stays the same, and all your existing notebooks remain right where you left them.
But the rename is just the headline. Alongside the new branding, Google is rolling out a set of upgrades that matter far more than a logo refresh.
A cloud computer inside every notebook
The biggest change is under the hood: every notebook now comes with its own isolated cloud compute environment, capable of writing and executing code directly inside the notebook. That means data analysis is no longer just a smart summary of your sources — it's real computation running against them. Spreadsheets, calculations, and charts are generated on the spot, using your actual data rather than a paraphrased description of it.
This capability is being rolled out first to Pro subscribers, giving power users a genuine reason to upgrade if they rely on the tool for serious analytical work.
Sync across Gemini and Search
The second major shift is connectivity. Notebooks will now sync with the standalone Gemini app, and support is coming soon to Google Search as well. Create a notebook in one place, edit it somewhere else, and the changes will propagate automatically — no more juggling separate silos of information.
On top of that, Google is finally adding a long-requested organizational feature: folders. For anyone using Gemini Notebook as a working knowledge base — pulling together documents, research, and reference material for ongoing projects — this is a meaningful quality-of-life upgrade rather than a nice-to-have.
From reader to analyst
Until now, the tool's core value was reading your documents and answering questions about them. With native code execution added directly on top of your sources, it moves from being a smart reading assistant to something closer to a full analytical partner — one that can crunch numbers, build visualizations, and surface insights instead of just summarizing text.
Taken together, the rename, the built-in compute layer, and the cross-platform sync suggest Google is positioning this tool as a central hub for knowledge work inside its ecosystem, rather than a standalone research sidekick. For teams and individuals who already lean on it to organize and interrogate large sets of documents, the shift from Gemini Notebook being a smart reader to a genuine data analyst could change how it fits into daily workflows.