Marketers invest huge amounts of effort refining messaging, design and content, yet they rarely experience their own website the way a brand-new visitor does. That gap often explains why sites that look highly polished still underperform. When I first discovered Google’s NotebookLM, I realized this AI tool provides a simple, practical way to replicate the perspective of a first-time visitor. With NotebookLM, you can upload a URL or documents — like a website, slide deck or report — and generate an Audio Overview. The result is a brief, two-speaker, podcast-style dialogue that summarizes and interprets the material you’ve provided. When you use a website URL, the Audio Overview essentially models how a new visitor is likely to understand your site.
Why this matters for marketers
Traditional analytics show what users do, but not how they interpret what they see and “hear.” NotebookLM’s Audio Overview acts as a perception check by revealing:
- Which content stands out and connects right away.
- What comes across as confusing, vague or underexplained.
- Which key details or calls-to-action are missing or buried.
Listening to the conversation compels marketers to step outside their internal assumptions and hear their site the way an outsider might. This difference between behavior and perception is crucial. Heatmaps can highlight where people click, and session recordings can show how far they scroll, but neither explains what visitors actually take away when they land on your page. Someone might spend 30 seconds on your homepage hero and still walk away unsure what your company really does. NotebookLM closes that gap by turning your website content into a conversational interpretation, offering direct insight into how your messaging…