Spammers Flood Google Search With Public Gemini Notebooks

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Gemini notebook spam pages bursting from a glowing search portal

By NewSunSEO September 25, 2026

Public Gemini notebook pages are being weaponized as a parasite SEO channel, flooding Google Search with thousands of spammed pages on topics from peptides and discount codes to adult products. The wave gives site owners and SEOs a clear window into how quickly black hat operators move against any new Google surface, and how slowly the index can respond.

What happened with the public notebook pages?

Anyone can publish a public notebook through Gemini and share a link. Those pages are crawlable and indexable by Google, which is exactly what spammers needed. Once the public notebook directory was live, operators began generating notebooks at scale around commercial and gray-market queries, including sex toys, peptides, coupon codes, and porn. The result was a parasite SEO pattern: free hosting inside a Google property, pointing search traffic at off-site offers.

The scale was visible inside the search results. By mid-September 2026, the count of indexed spammed notebook pages climbed past 12,000 and was still rising, with the spam running through topics like discount codes, apps, and adult content.

Who noticed the spam first?

Search marketers spotted the pattern on X (formerly Twitter). The earliest public call-out came from a UK-based SEO who posted that he had “hacked the AI Overview” using Google’s own product, referring to the AI-generated overviews that quote and link out to notebook pages. A second SEO then documented the scope, noting that black hat operators were treating indexable public notebooks as a new parasite SEO tactic. A third, well-known search analyst amplified the thread and posted screenshots of the search results page showing notebook URLs ranking above legitimate sources, along with the prompts that produced the offending notebooks.

What does parasite SEO on a Google surface look like?

Parasite SEO is the practice of publishing content on a high-authority domain that a third party controls, then capturing that domain’s ranking power to promote an outside offer. Hosting on a trusted domain lets the spam page inherit trust signals that it did not build. In this case, the trusted host was Google itself, since public Gemini notebooks live on a Google property.

The mechanics were straightforward. An operator creates a notebook with a prompt tuned to a commercial query, publishes it publicly, and lets Google’s crawler pick it up. Because the URL sits on a Google domain, it can rank quickly and even surface inside AI Overview answers. The page then funnels clicks to whatever the operator is promoting, often an affiliate offer, a pharmacy, or an adult site.

Why was Google slow to clean it up?

Within roughly 24 hours of the thread going wide, Google removed the shared notebook directory from its search results. The pages stopped ranking almost immediately. The delay is the story, however. The index was visibly full of junk on a Google-owned surface for at least a full day, and the count kept climbing during that window.

Spammers typically test for indexability the moment a new Google product or endpoint goes live, then scale the methods that succeed. New Google surfaces stay polluted until manual or automated cleanup catches up without a fast cleanup process built into each launch.

What does this mean for SEOs and site owners?

The recent incident reminds us that indexable surfaces, especially on high-authority domains, are the first place black hat operators test. SEOs who monitor new Google features can expect spam to appear on those surfaces shortly after launch. Tracking those surfaces early can reveal abuse and, occasionally, ranking opportunities before the noise settles.

Running competitive monitoring makes keeping a close eye on AI Overview citations a case study priority. When a Google surface is being spammed, the citations inside AI answers can shift toward junk pages for a window of time, changing which sources an AI engine presents as authoritative.

Local businesses tracking how they appear across search and AI engines can use a tool like BizScoreAI to keep tabs on what AI search actually sees when it reads a business listing. For technical audits of a site itself, including the kind of indexability checks that determine whether a page can be discovered in the first place, SEOScanPRO runs a full audit and shows the measured result behind every check.

FAQ

What are public Gemini notebook pages?

Public Gemini notebook pages are notebooks created inside Google’s Gemini product that the author chooses to publish and share publicly. Because they live on a Google domain and are crawlable, Google can index them and surface them in Search and AI Overviews.

How many spammed notebook pages showed up in Google Search?

The visible count of indexed spammed notebook pages rose past 12,000 and was still climbing before Google removed the shared notebook directory from its search results.

Did Google fix the spam in public notebook pages?

Yes. Roughly a day after the spam was widely flagged on X, Google removed the shared notebook directory from its search results, and the spam pages stopped ranking.

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