Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook [Source: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-notebook/notebooklm-gemini-notebook/]. When people hear about a rename, the first reaction is usually “do I have to rebuild everything I built before?” — let me give you the answer up front: no. Both Google and the press confirm this is just a rename; the URL and features stay the same, and it keeps its standalone product positioning [Source: https://www.bnext.com.tw/article/91193/notebooklm-complete-guide-and-use-cases]. Old notebooks and old share links all carry over — what’s changing is the sign, not the address. So if you already have one in use, it’s still there, and you don’t have to do a thing.

What’s actually worth pausing to think about isn’t what it’s called — it’s that this product has been chronically underestimated by small businesses. Most people use it to “help me summarize a paper,” but a much better use case is this: throw all your company’s scattered operational documents into it, and turn it into an SOP brain that any employee can query with a question. And you can get started on the free tier.

It’s Just a Rename — Not a Single One of Your Old Notebooks Will Go Away

Let’s first lay out the free tier’s limits, because that decides whether you can realistically use it as your company knowledge base. The free tier caps the number of sources you can add per notebook, the word count per source, and the size of uploaded files — and Google may adjust these allowances as plans evolve, so before you commit to using it as a knowledge base, I’d suggest checking the official help page for the current numbers. But here’s the headline: for a small shop, that capacity is usually more than enough.

A small shop’s return policy, quote workflow, employee handbook, common customer complaint reply templates, and shipping SOP — all added together, it’s hard to fill up the free tier. So for the vast majority of small businesses, free-tier capacity isn’t the bottleneck — the real problem is usually that you’ve never bothered to consolidate the documents into one place, and they’re still lying around on different people’s laptops and Google Drives.

Turn Scattered Company Documents Into a Brain Your Employees Can Ask

In practice, it takes less time than you’d think. Open a new notebook, drop in your return-policy