How to Duplicate a Notebook in NotebookLM (& What to Do Instead) — Gemini Notebook

I went looking for the "duplicate notebook" button the day I wanted two versions of the same research setup — one to keep clean, one to experiment in. Same sources, two notebooks. It seemed like the most basic thing in the world. There is no button. There is no right-click "Make a copy", no Duplicate in the notebook menu, nothing.

NotebookLM — Google renamed it Gemini Notebook in July 2026, same app — simply has no way to duplicate, copy or clone a notebook. So let me save you the search: you can't do it directly, and I'll be honest below about what an extension can and can't do about that. But there is a fast way to get the same result.

Why there's no clone button (and no extension can add one)

This matters because you'll see tools that hint they can "copy" notebooks. Cloning a notebook would require NotebookLM to expose an API for reading and writing a whole notebook's contents — sources, notes, chat, studio outputs — and it doesn't. Extensions work by acting on the page you're looking at, the same buttons you can see. If the app has no clone action, there's nothing for a tool to click. So any add-on claiming to truly clone a notebook is worth a very careful look — what's actually achievable is re-adding the same sources, quickly.

The realistic workaround: rebuild, don't clone

A NotebookLM notebook is really two things: the set of sources you put in, and the AI output (notes, chat, summaries) generated from them. The output can't be transferred — but it's also cheap to regenerate. The sources are the part that took you real time to gather. So the whole game is reproducing the source set into a fresh notebook without doing it by hand, one link at a time.

1. Open the original notebook and take stock of its sources — the URLs, and the files you uploaded.
2. Create a new, empty notebook to be your copy.
3. Re-add the same sources. Natively, that's the Add sources box, one paste at a time — the tedious part.
4. Regenerate or copy across any notes you cared about. (If you want those out of NotebookLM entirely, see exporting notes to Markdown & PDF.)

The one-click way to speed up the rebuild

The only genuinely slow step above is re-adding sources. That's exactly what bulk import removes. With NotebookBloom you paste every source URL from the original into the new notebook and add them in a single pass — no link-by-link grind. If the notebook was built from a YouTube playlist, channel or an RSS feed, you can re-add the whole batch at once. Full walkthrough: bulk-import sources into NotebookLM.

It won't clone the AI notes — nothing can — but it turns "rebuild this notebook" from a twenty-minute chore into a ten-second paste. And once you're rebuilding notebooks anyway, it's worth setting them up so the copies don't get lost: NotebookBloom adds folders and tags on top of the flat notebook list, plus search across every notebook so a duplicate never disappears into the pile.

If what you really wanted was the references

Sometimes "duplicate the notebook" really means "I want this notebook's sources somewhere reusable." If that's you, skip the copy entirely and export the source list as citations you own: push the sources into Zotero or Mendeley via BibTeX, or generate APA / MLA / BibTeX references for a paper. That way the source set lives in your reference manager, not locked inside one notebook you keep wanting to clone.

NotebookBloom is an independent extension and is not affiliated with Google. NotebookLM and Gemini Notebook are names for the same Google product; NotebookLM is a trademark of Google LLC.