NotebookLM tops Perplexity in total web visits

NotebookLM quietly becoming a bigger destination than Perplexity is one of the more surprising traffic stories in AI — it happened without a major product launch, on the back of compounding word-of-mouth from Audio Overviews.

• –NotebookLM's Audio Overview feature, which converts any document into a podcast-style conversation, went viral in late 2024 and kept pulling users back in ways that pure search AI doesn't
• –Perplexity's audience skews toward power users and researchers; NotebookLM's has expanded to students, educators, and knowledge workers — a far larger addressable market
• –Google's distribution moat (tight integration with Drive, Docs, and YouTube) is now showing up clearly in traffic numbers, giving NotebookLM a structural advantage Perplexity can't easily replicate
• –This data reframes the AI tools race: document AI is no longer a niche feature but a primary destination competing directly with AI search