How to get NotebookLM flashcards into Anki — with sources (Gemini Notebook)

I do most of my studying in Anki. So the first thing I wanted from NotebookLM's flashcard feature was obvious: get these cards into Anki. Turns out that's the one thing it won't let you do.

NotebookLM — now Gemini Notebook after Google's July 2026 rename — will happily generate a stack of flashcards from your sources. They're decent. But there's no export button, no.apkg, no CSV, nothing. And there's a second problem that bothers me more: the cards don't tell you where the answer came from. For casual trivia that's fine. For med school or a licensing exam, a flashcard you can't trace back to a source is a flashcard you can't trust.

The manual way (tedious, but let's be honest about it)

Before I automated this, here's what the process looked like:

1. Generate the cards in NotebookLM.
2. Copy each question into a spreadsheet column, and the matching answer into the next column.
3. Add a third column for the source — I'd manually note which document each card came from, because Anki lets you put anything on the back of a card and I wanted the source there.
4. Save the sheet as tab-separated text. Anki imports TSV cleanly if you map the columns.
5. In Anki: File → Import, pick the file, map column 1 → Front, column 2 → Back, column 3 → also Back (or a custom field).

A tab-separated file for three cards looks like this — Front, then a tab, then Back, then a tab, then Source:

What does the hippocampus consolidate?	Short-term memories into long-term storage	Kandel, Principles of Neural Science, ch. 65
Which vitamin deficiency causes scurvy?	Vitamin C (ascorbic acid)	Harrison's Internal Medicine, 21e
Normal resting heart rate in adults?	60–100 bpm	AHA Guidelines 2023

This works. I did it for months. But copying question/answer pairs one at a time, then hand-typing the source for each, is exactly the kind of task where you start cutting corners — and the corner people cut first is the source, which is the corner that matters most.

Why the source on the card matters

When you're reviewing 200 cards a day and one of them says something that contradicts what a professor said in lecture, you need to know which one is right — immediately. If the source is printed on the back of the card, you check it in two seconds. If it isn't, you either trust a card you can't verify or you go hunting through notebooks. Neither is good the week before an exam.

The one-click way

NotebookBloom pulls the generated cards straight out of your notebook and exports them with the source already attached. There's a small technical reason this is reliable that I'm oddly proud of: it reads the cards from NotebookLM's own data, not by scraping the visible page, so it doesn't break every time Google nudges the layout. Three ways out:

• .apkg — a ready-made Anki deck. Double-click, it imports, done.
• TSV — the tab-separated format above, if you want to tweak before importing.
• Direct push — send straight into a running Anki via AnkiConnect.

Every card carries the source on the back, and there's a cleanup pass that fixes the small formatting junk (stray markdown, broken math) that otherwise makes cards ugly in Anki.

Still called NotebookLM, or Gemini Notebook now?

Both names point to the same app. Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook in July 2026, but the flashcard feature, the sources, and this whole workflow are unchanged. Whether your browser tab says NotebookLM or Gemini Notebook, the export works the same way.

Spaced repetition only helps if the cards actually make it into your review pile. Get them into Anki, keep the source on the back, and let the algorithm do its job.

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.