Turn Your Documents Into an Answering Machine

Somebody in your business is the only person who knows where things are written down. The supplier's return window, the warranty wording, the bit of the insurance policy about subcontractors, the machine manual with the error code table. When that person is on holiday, everyone guesses.

Google's notebook product fixes a specific slice of that problem: it answers questions using only documents you upload, with citations pointing back to the exact source. It will not tell you things it has read elsewhere. For a business that needs the answer that is actually in your supplier agreement, that constraint is the entire value.

Fifty sources per notebook, and what that buys a small business

Google's help page describes the product as "an AI-powered research assistant designed to help you refine and organize your ideas", and its chat behaviour as being able to "get grounded information based on your sources with clear in-line citations for accuracy, transparency, and trust". Elsewhere on the same page it is described as "designed to answer questions based on the information provided in your uploaded sources".

The free allowance, quoted from Google's limits page: "Get 100 notebooks, with up to 50 sources each and 500,000 words each" and "Have daily limits of 50 chat queries and 3 audio generations".

Read that as a business capacity rather than a spec. Fifty sources per notebook is enough for one complete domain. One hundred notebooks is enough to give every domain its own. Fifty chat queries a day is the number that will actually bite if a whole team leans on it, because queries are per account and not per notebook.

So structure it by domain from the start, not as one giant notebook called Company:

• Suppliers. Every current supply agreement, price list and returns policy.
• Kit. Manuals, warranty documents, service schedules for every machine and vehicle.
• How we do things. Your own written procedures, checklists, safety documents, induction notes.
• Insurance and compliance. Policy schedules, certificates, whatever your industry requires you to hold.

Four notebooks. Each one answerable by anyone in the business without asking the person who knows.

Load the documents your staff actually ask about

Adding sources, per Google's page on adding or discovering new sources: open the notebook, select Add, then either upload files or "Type a research question in the search box to find sources from the web or files from Workspace", and select the sources you want to include.

The documented format list covers most of what a small business has lying around:

The YouTube line is quietly useful for the Kit notebook. Manufacturer maintenance videos with captions become searchable text alongside the manual, so "what does the flashing amber light mean" can be answered from a video nobody wants to sit through.

Do the loading in one sitting per notebook. A half-loaded notebook is worse than none, because someone asks it a question, gets "that is not in the sources", and never comes back.

One practical note on the fifty-source ceiling. It is per notebook, so the way you run out is by dumping everything into one place rather than by having too many documents. A supplier notebook holding twelve agreements and their price lists sits at twenty-four sources and has room for years of growth. The same twelve agreements in a notebook that also holds every manual and every policy hits the wall in a month, and then you are deleting sources to add sources, which is how people quietly abandon a system.

Keep a plain text file listing what went into each notebook and when. Nothing in the product gives you a changelog of your own sources, and in eighteen months the question "is the current supplier agreement in here or the 2024 one" will matter more than anything else on this page.

Ask in a way that forces a citation

The default way people ask is the way they would ask a colleague, and that is where a grounded tool gets used badly. Three patterns that work better:

Quote the exact clause in the supplier agreement that covers returns after 30 days. If there is no such clause, say so.

Compare the notice periods in all four supplier agreements. Give the number of days and the source for each.

List every document in this notebook that mentions subcontractors, with the sentence that mentions them.

Each one asks for something checkable. Google's stated design is answering from your uploaded sources with in-line citations, so a question phrased to demand a quote or a source name gives you an answer you can verify in ten seconds by clicking the citation. A question phrased as "can we return this?" gives you a paragraph you have to trust.

Teach one rule to whoever else uses it: click the citation before you act on the answer. That single habit converts this from a confident answering machine into a search engine for your own filing cabinet.

Where the published limits stop making sense

Four things the documentation leaves unresolved, all of which matter once you rely on this.

Two different units for source size. Every source is capped at 500,000 words or 200MB, except Google Sheets, which the same page caps at 100k tokens "at this time". Words and tokens are different units, no conversion is published, and the phrase "at this time" signals a limit that moves. If your prices live in Sheets, expect a spreadsheet source to hit a ceiling long before a Word document does.

The paid tiers have no numbers on the page. The limits page publishes the free allowance and then points free users to learn more about upgrading, without stating what the upgraded allowance is. So you can size a free deployment exactly and cannot size a paid one from the same document.

Scanned documents are unaddressed. Nothing in the sources documentation states whether a PDF that is a photograph of a page, with no text layer, gets read. Given that the same page is explicit that images inside web pages are not imported, do not assume a scanned twenty-year-old supplier contract will work. Test one before you load forty, and if it comes back empty, get the document retyped or run it through something that produces real text first.

Privacy wording differs by account type, and the difference is not decorative. For personal accounts, Google's page says: "Your data is protected, and is not used to train Gemini Notebook unless you provide feedback." For Workspace and Workspace for Education accounts it says uploads, queries and model responses "will not be reviewed by human reviewers, and will not be used to train AI models." The personal wording carries a carve-out for feedback that the Workspace wording does not. If you are uploading client contracts, that distinction is the reason to do it on a business account.

Worth knowing about the name as well, because it affects your ability to find help. Google's own support site serves the same articles under both support.google.com/notebooklm/ and support.google.com/gemininotebook/, the current help pages call the product Gemini Notebook, and the product still lives at notebooklm.google. None of the pages explains the change. Our directory entry is filed under NotebookLM, which is what most people still search for.

Start with the Kit notebook. It is the one where a wrong answer is cheapest, the documents are already PDFs, and the questions people ask it are narrow enough that you will find out quickly whether your team clicks the citations.