Google is developing a collections feature for NotebookLM that would allow users to group multiple notebooks under a single named heading, surfaced through a dedicated tab in the main navigation. The capability has not been officially confirmed and appears early in development, with no public timeline attached, according to TestingCatalog, which spotted the feature in testing.
The addition addresses a structural limitation that has followed NotebookLM since its public release. Within any single notebook, the tool already clusters and organizes sources automatically, a source-level grouping layer that reached full rollout in early May 2026. What has been missing is any native mechanism for grouping notebooks themselves. Until now, power users have worked around the gap using browser extensions to approximate folder behavior, and Google’s own team has acknowledged notebook-level grouping as the primary missing piece.
Collections would sit above that flat scrolling list, providing a top-level organizational structure for people managing large libraries. The feature is framed around a single heading per collection rather than nested hierarchies, which fits the visual design pattern visible in the testing screenshots.
The timing makes sense given how quickly NotebookLM’s user base has grown. Notebook projects became free for all Gemini web users earlier this year, and the two products now sync: a source added in one surfaces in the other. The free tier supports up to 100 notebooks, a ceiling generous enough that navigation friction was always going to become a real problem at scale.
TestingCatalog also noted that Google appeared to have weighed a label-based approach to notebook organization before settling on collections, though the reasoning behind any shift was not disclosed. The distinction matters: labels would let a single notebook appear in multiple categories, while collections imply exclusive membership under one heading. The final behavior will depend on what ships.
The organizational weakness that collections would solve is not unique to NotebookLM. ChatGPT Projects, Claude Projects, and Perplexity Spaces each offer a single container model but have no graceful answer for users managing dozens of them. A clean top-level grouping layer would give Google an early structural answer to a problem that every research-tool competitor is starting to feel as their active user counts grow.
NotebookLM has spent roughly the past year repositioning itself from a document question-and-answer layer into a research-to-output hub tightly coupled with Gemini. Collections fits that trajectory: the tool is no longer useful only for occasional document lookup; it is used as a sustained workspace, and sustained workspaces accumulate enough notebooks to demand real organization. The feature is a scaling requirement, not a cosmetic one.
No confirmation has come from Google about availability or release window. Teams building research workflows on top of NotebookLM should watch for the collections tab to appear in their accounts; if it does, the organizational logic used at the folder level will likely shape how they should restructure existing notebook libraries before the feature fully rolls out.
Reported by TestingCatalog on June 28, 2026.
