Trusted sources
Sources worth feeding NotebookLM
A notebook is only as good as what you put in it. Every entry below has a copy-ready link — paste it straight into NotebookLM's Add source dialog — plus a tip on the cleanest import route for that kind of material.
- 1Copy a link. Use the Copy link button on any source below.
- 2Open Add source. In your notebook: Add source → Website (or Link).
- 3Paste and confirm. You can paste several links at once — one per line.
Academic papers
NotebookLM reads the text of the page you give it. Paste pages that carry the full text (an arXiv abs page, a PubMed Central article) — a paywalled landing page imports as just an abstract.
The widest net for finding papers across every field; follow its links to a full-text version before importing.
Preprints for AI, CS, math and physics. Paste the abs page URL as a Website source — figures survive that route better than an uploaded PDF.
AI-assisted paper discovery with citation graphs — good for building the reading list before you build the notebook.
Free full-text biomedical papers — unlike PubMed proper, articles here import complete, not as abstracts.
Working papers in economics, law, finance and the social sciences, most downloadable as full-text PDFs.
Data & official records
NotebookLM is a reading tool, not a spreadsheet engine — feed it the written reports and summary pages, not raw CSVs, and ask about what the documents say.
Development and economic indicators for every country, each with a written overview page that imports cleanly.
Macroeconomic outlooks and country reports — the Article IV PDFs are dense, citable source material.
Comparative statistics and policy reports across member economies, with strong methodology notes.
Every US public company filing — 10-Ks and 10-Qs make excellent grounded sources for company research.
Long-form, sourced explainers on global trends — article pages import with their context intact.
Books & archives
For public-domain books, download the Plain Text file and upload it — the 500,000-words-per-source limit fits most novels whole. ePub uploads are supported too.
75,000+ public-domain books. Grab the Plain Text UTF-8 edition for the cleanest import.
Books, historical documents, magazines and archived websites — much of it downloadable as text or PDF.
Carefully typeset public-domain ePubs — a cleaner starting point than raw scans for literature notebooks.
Transcribed historical texts, speeches and primary documents, page-linked and citable.
Catalog and lending arm of the Internet Archive — useful for finding which editions exist and where.
Code & ML research
Documentation pages import better than repositories: paste a project's docs URL or README page, not the repo root.
ML papers matched to their implementations and benchmarks — import the paper page and the README together.
A daily-curated feed of AI research, each paper with a discussion page that adds context.
READMEs, docs folders and wikis are strong sources for how a tool actually works — paste the rendered page URL.
The reference for web platform APIs — reliable ground truth for a web-dev notebook.
Accepted answers on the technical sites make good targeted sources for narrow questions.
Courses & textbooks
Lecture notes and open textbooks are the highest signal-to-noise sources for studying — often better than the slides you were given.
Full courses with downloadable lecture notes and exams — the notes PDFs are ideal notebook sources.
Peer-reviewed open textbooks with free PDF downloads. One textbook chapter per source works well.
Article-format lessons import directly; video lessons come in via their YouTube versions.
Video & audio
Public YouTube videos with captions import as sources directly, with timestamped citations. For podcasts, upload the audio file — NotebookLM transcribes it.
Lectures, talks and interviews — paste the video URL. For whole channels or playlists, see the tools page.
Every talk has a full transcript page — paste that URL for a cleaner import than the video.
Find the episode, download the audio file, upload it as a source — long interviews become quotable, searchable text.
Everything listed is legitimately free to access. Check the license before republishing what a notebook produces from these materials — free to read is not always free to redistribute.