Two of the most popular Report presets in NotebookLM — FAQ and Timeline — have quietly vanished from the one-click menu, upending the way many students, researchers, and teams spin source material into organized documents. Google has confirmed that those abilities are still there, they’re just not included as Report default suggestions and now sit behind the “Create Your Own” option instead.
The change comes as part of a larger NotebookLM update through Gemini, which included new learning options like flashcards and quizzes, extended Audio Overviews, a Blog Post Report style as well as dynamic, theme-aware recommendations. The upgrade opens up what the app is capable of, but also creates friction with those who counted on making FAQs or chronological timelines with the push of a button.
Reddit user threads and developer forums were first to indicate the missing formats. Since then a spokesperson for Google has clarified that users will still be able to create both types structures by adding these via Reports using the “Create Your Own” buttons, in other words revamping fixed templates into customisable reusable patterns.
What changed in Reports
Reports is NotebookLM’s machine for transforming uploaded sources into structured outputs, study guides, briefings, posts, all with citations and scoped context. The revamp is focused on studiocontext-driven recommendations, better builders for adaptive programming, and tools to build the nomenclature. In practical terms, that translated to the app occasionally, gently nudging you toward specifying output structure instead of offering static shelf of presets.
The deleted templates for FAQ and Timeline enforced a predictable structure: questions with short answers, or an ordered list of events with dates and synopses. They became popular, one assumes, because they required the model to be clear and because they made results easy to scan. Now, the user has to explicitly request for such outcomes, and specify fields and constraints in the builder.
Why FAQ and Timeline were significant
FAQs form the backbone of onboarding documents, customer support knowledge bases and your study packets. They mold sprawling material to a Q.&A. format, which can be easy to skim and update. And timelines are essential in competitive intelligence, case studies, historical research, and product retrospectives, helping to establish the order of events and sources and minimize confusion when reviewing the past.
”Education researchers often will tell you that the structured formats can cut the cognitive burden by turning unstructured text in predictably broken chunks.” In a practical sense, that is why these templates became staples of teachers, analysts and product teams. Killing the one-click pipelines isn’t going to stop these flows, but it is another setup step at the point in time that users most want everything to be fast.
Google’s likely rationale
There’s a plausible product logic at work here: Leave fewer static presets around, keep the interface leaner and don’t allow for overactive templates. The dynamic options may be suggest Q & A or chronological formats when the model determines that such formats would be appropriate for the sources, resulting in less clutter across a wide variety of use cases. Favoring users toward custom schemas might also promote clearer instruction with tighter, uke outputs.
That mirrors patterns across AI productivity tools. Notion AI is relying more on templatable prompts and databases than locked AI formats. The Copilot environment for Microsoft places heavy emphasis on context appropriate messages that follow established patterns, particularly within Loop/SharePoint. It looks like Google may be positioning NotebookLM in that direction: smaller surface area, more control where it matters.
Fast ways to emulate the formats
To create an FAQ from scratch: open reports and click on Create Your Own, define sections such as question, answer and source. Ask the model to pull out high-signal questions from the images you upload, cluster them by topic, cap answers by max-length, and provide citations for each answer. When you add constraints like “prefer questions with direct evidence in the sources” it helps keep results grounded.
For a Timeline:select “Create Your Own” and define the Date, Event, Summary, and Source. “train the model on how to order from oldest to youngest and to infer dates only if it is confirmed that it is a date and also to flag uncertainties.” For research-heavy sets, request a second pass to merge duplicates and standardize date formats. This combination usually reproduces the old preset clarity with more control.
If you find yourself generating the same outputs over and over, hold onto a lightweight prompt snippet or schema description that you can paste into the builder.
Teams can also standardize on the field document field names (for example, Question, Answer, Evidence) to maintain consistency across notebooks.
The bottom line
FAQ and Timeline haven’t disappeared from NotebookLM’s features, but the easy buttons are history. Power users have more flexibility with “Create Your Own,” but casual users lose a bit of convenience. Under a larger trend toward adaptive suggestions and custom schemas this feels like a strategic simplification, not necessarily a full feature retreat — but it will be interesting to see whether flexibility or speed wins out for most workflows.
Product pages and earlier announcements from Google emphasize the app’s growing — and dynamic — study aids, and Audio Overviews, indicating a focus on studying workflows rather than static templates. Whether one-click FAQ and Timeline are resurrected could depend on how those tools were being used by educators and analysts who were building their routines around them, the kind of users who frequently determine the ways these tools permeate organizations.