AI Prompt Generator for NotebookLM Study
Fill in the blanks and copy — 5 ready-to-use prompts that turn NotebookLM into a personal tutor: a full lecture, a study guide, a graded practice exam, a 3-level explainer, and real-world examples, all grounded in your own uploaded sources.
Fill in the blanks below — the prompt updates live. Written for NotebookLM (also called Gemini Notebook), where grounding in your uploaded sources is what makes these work.
How it works
Every prompt below assumes your source material is already uploaded to the notebook — these are things to ask about what's there, not topics to research from scratch. The more complete your sources, the more the grounding (and the citations) actually mean something.
None of this replaces reading the material yourself. What it does is turn a passive pile of PDFs, slides, or lecture recordings into something you can be quizzed on, have explained three different ways, or graded against — which is a different kind of studying than re-reading the same page a third time.
The Feynman Explainer (#4) is worth running before the Exam Simulator (#3): seeing which of the three explanation levels actually matches how you'd teach the concept to someone else is a faster diagnostic of real understanding than a test score alone, and it tells you what to shore up before you sit the practice exam.
FAQ
Is NotebookLM still called NotebookLM?
Mostly, for now — Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook in July 2026. The product page describes it as "the same product you know and love," and existing notebooks stay fully accessible under the new name. Both names currently point at the same tool, and nothing about the source-grounded behavior described below changed with the rename.
Do I need these prompts, or does NotebookLM already do this automatically?
Some of it, yes — try the built-in Flashcards, Quizzes, and Study Guide/Report buttons in the Studio panel first. What the prompts below add is control those one-click buttons don't give you: a specific 3-part lecture structure, exam grading with a ranked list of your weakest areas, three separate explanations of the same concept at different depth levels, or real-world scenario walkthroughs — none of which map onto a single built-in button.
Does NotebookLM actually cite its sources?
Yes — that's its core design. NotebookLM (Gemini Notebook) answers are grounded in whatever you upload, and responses link back to the specific passage they came from. That's also why the Professor Prompt below explicitly asks it to cite a source page or section for every claim, rather than assuming it will by default.
Do these prompts work in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini's regular chat instead of NotebookLM?
The citation-checking and exam-grading prompts specifically depend on the AI only using documents you've given it, which is NotebookLM's core design — a general-purpose chat without your sources loaded will fill gaps with outside knowledge instead of your material. If you're using a different tool, upload your source files there first, where that's supported, so the same grounding applies.
Can I trust the exam grading and weak-areas ranking?
Treat it as a strong first pass rather than a certified grade. Grading quality depends on how completely you uploaded the relevant material, and it's worth spot-checking flagged wrong answers against the cited source passages yourself, especially for short-answer and long-form questions where phrasing and partial credit are judgment calls.