NotebookLM Sharing: Who Can See Sources, Chats, and Public Links?
Your notebook holds a product manual alongside an internal discount policy. What can a customer reach if you send only the Chat View link?
You can share a notebook so colleagues ask their own questions about a common collection of documents. But a link that opens directly into chat does not make the underlying documents inaccessible. Chat View hides material from the default interface while leaving recipients with underlying access.
The service familiar as NotebookLM is currently named Gemini Notebook in Google's help center. Its sharing documentation explicitly says recipients may find their way to materials hidden by Chat View. For a customer-facing knowledge base, the documents included in the notebook therefore need to be suitable for those customers to read.
Choose the recipient's role
Private sharing begins with the Share button and an email address. Viewer access is appropriate for someone who needs to consult the material. Editor access also allows changing sources and notes and sharing the notebook with additional people. Giving an occasional reader editing rights hands over more than the ability to ask questions.
| Setting | What it enables | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| Viewer | Read shared sources and notes | Hide the original material |
| Editor | Change sources and notes; share further | Limit the recipient to asking questions |
| Chat View | Open a focused chat interface | Completely revoke access to hidden content |
| Disable Allow copies | Restrict duplication of the entire notebook | Prevent copying accessible content |
A team can give editing rights to the people maintaining its procedures and viewer access to colleagues using those procedures. That makes the source-maintenance responsibility explicit. It also reduces the chance that someone intending only to consult the notebook changes the material everyone else relies on.
Keep private conversations distinct from saved notes
A NotebookLM community question describes this use case directly: share a compiled source collection while letting recipients ask their own questions, without exposing the owner’s or one another’s conversations.
Google's current documentation says chat history within Gemini Notebook is retained privately for the user. People can consult a common source collection without treating every question as a shared team note. The chat panel's three-dot menu includes Delete Chat History for clearing that personal history.
Save to note changes where a response is stored. It preserves the answer's formatting, including tables and citations, as a note. Viewers of a shared notebook can read shared notes, so saving an answer there can make its content available beyond the original conversation.
For example, an onboarding coordinator might ask about a procedure, inspect the citations, and save the confirmed steps for the team. That is useful shared reference material. A tentative personnel observation typed during private exploration has a different audience. Before turning a response into a note, read the actual text and its cited material.
Build a source collection for the audience
Consider a sales notebook containing a product manual, published pricing, and an internal discount policy. A customer may need answers about the first two documents. Sending a Chat View link to that existing notebook leaves the third document in the shared collection.
A more suitable setup is a separate customer notebook containing the manual and public pricing. The internal policy then remains outside that collection. A chat instruction asking the model not to discuss discounts cannot substitute for excluding a document that the recipient should not access.
Before distributing the link, try the questions customers are likely to ask: where to request a refund, which plan includes a feature, or how to complete a setup step. Open the citations in the responses and read the underlying passages. Google's chat guide explains that citations lead back to source context.
If the public documents cannot answer an important question, add an appropriate public explanation to the source collection. Uploading an entire internal handbook just to fill that gap expands what recipients can access. One good generated answer does not establish that every document in the notebook is suitable for distribution.
Private invitations, public notebooks, and artifact links
For named recipients, open the notebook on the web, select Share, add their email addresses, and choose Viewer or Editor. Personal Gmail accounts can share a notebook with up to 50 users and cannot share with Google Groups.
For public access, change the sharing option to Anyone with a link. Recipients must sign in to a Google account to use the shared notebook. That gives them the notebook experience, including asking their own questions about its available material.
An artifact link works differently. The owner of a public notebook can separately share a slide deck, audio overview, report, or other Studio output. People with that artifact link can view it without signing in. Choose the notebook link when people need to ask questions; choose an artifact link when the intended experience is consuming a specific output.
Changes to a public notebook appear through its existing link, so an updated source collection does not require distributing a new URL. It also means editing the notebook changes what visitors encounter. Google's public-notebook guide describes the sharing and update behavior.
Use Chat View for focus and copying controls for duplication
To send people directly to the focused interface, open Share and select Copy link to chat view. Recipients enter the conversation screen with the material panels hidden. For a notebook already containing customer-facing documentation, this lets a visitor start a product question without first navigating the collection of sources and outputs.
Allow copies addresses a different action. When enabled, recipients can duplicate the notebook with its sources and Studio content. Google says chat history and notes are excluded from that notebook-copy operation. Disabling it stops duplication of the notebook itself, but recipients can still copy content they can access.
To change copying permissions, open Share on a notebook already shared with at least one person, set the Allow copies checkbox, and select Save. A recipient with copying permission can use Copy, then Create. If essential instructions exist only as notes, include them in a copied source as well, because notes do not accompany the notebook copy.
For training material, allowing copies lets each participant add sources and continue working from the supplied collection. For a reference maintained by one team, restricting whole-notebook duplication helps keep readers using the shared version. The choice depends on whether recipients should develop their own collection or consult the centrally maintained one.
Drive updates can change the shared source collection
Sources imported from Google Drive currently update automatically. Google says synchronization occurs every few minutes and changes are brought in when the notebook opens. You can also open a source and use Click to sync with Google Drive. The source-import guide explains this behavior.
That matters after the initial sharing review. A document that contains only public instructions today might acquire an internal paragraph tomorrow. If it feeds a customer notebook, its later content matters too. Maintaining a separate public source document prevents routine edits to an internal handbook from changing the material intended for customers.
Drive access also affects source availability. Importing requires at least view access. If access is lost or the original file is deleted, the source becomes inaccessible in owned or shared notebooks. It still counts toward source limits but is not used by chat or newly generated Studio outputs.
When an answer stops drawing on an expected document, inspect whether that source remains accessible before assuming the model has simply ignored it. Conversely, when a policy changes, inspect a new answer's citations and review already distributed outputs. A source update does not rewrite a document someone previously downloaded.
Manage exported files and ending access
Exporting a report to Docs or a table to Sheets creates another sharing task. The notebook's permissions do not carry over to the exported file, and edits in the exported document do not synchronize back into the notebook. Open the file's own sharing controls and set its intended recipients.
This also determines how to correct distributed material. If a team edits an exported report, colleagues still reading the notebook do not automatically receive that revision. Decide where the maintained explanation lives, then update the other version when it is still in use.
To end public notebook access, change its sharing setting to Restricted. Google says making the notebook private or deleting it stops access through the public link. This cannot recall material a recipient has already copied or downloaded. Separately shared Docs and Sheets retain their own access settings.
Feedback sends material through another route. Google's privacy documentation says personal-account thumbs-up or thumbs-down feedback can include associated prompts, sources, uploads, and outputs for human review. For Workspace and Education users, it says uploads, queries, and model responses are not reviewed by humans even with feedback and are not used to train AI models. These processing terms do not remove the reading access you grant to a notebook viewer.