Google's NotebookLM rebrand may widen how its AI products pull and reuse web content, adding another crawler to the list treating your pages as raw material. Site owners need to decide which AI crawlers give something back and which only take.
Your content becomes the training set and the answer, while your traffic becomes the cost.
Google has rebranded NotebookLM, and the change may expose more of your site to AI scraping. The concern is that the rebrand widens how Google's AI products can pull and reuse web content, adding another crawler to the growing list that treats your pages as raw material for answers it serves elsewhere.
This is the same tension publishers and businesses have been fighting for two years. AI tools read your content, summarise it and hand the answer to a user who never visits your site. Every new AI surface is another mouth to feed, and the site owner rarely gets a say or a click in return.
Why it matters
For Australian businesses that publish to earn search traffic, the maths keeps getting worse. You invest to create content, an AI product ingests it, and the value flows to the platform rather than back to you. Blocking every crawler is a blunt tool that can also cut your visibility. Doing nothing hands your work away for free.
The decision is not simple, and pretending it is helps no one. Some AI crawlers drive referral traffic and citations. Others take and give nothing. Knowing which is which, and controlling access on your own terms, is becoming part of the job.
Roughly one in three of the most visited websites already block major AI crawlers, and this rebrand adds another to keep an eye on
What to do about it
Audit your robots.txt and know exactly which AI crawlers you allow and which you block.
Separate the crawlers that send referral traffic from the ones that only take.
Track referral traffic and citations from AI products so you can measure what access is actually worth.
Review your position every quarter. The crawlers and the rules keep changing, and a set-and-forget file will fall behind.
The question is no longer whether AI reads your site. It is whether you get anything back when it does.