If you've used Obsidian for long enough, you know the chaos that can come with it. Notes pile up or multiply, and suddenly your second brain starts to feel more like a digital attic. Sure, the Graph view looks cool and is actually one of my secrets to getting the most out of Obsidian, but it still doesn’t solve the issue of misnamed or unnamed files. I had to come up with a plan to navigate this mess without getting overwhelmed. Then I brought NotebookLM into the mix.

So far, pairing NotebookLM with my design apps has been a great booster. So I thought, why not pair it with Obsidian to help me sort through my messy notes and build a personal search engine? By feeding my Obsidian vault into NotebookLM, I can get summaries, overviews, ask questions, quickly surface anything I need, and get additional context to my writing, research, and projects. It became an interactive layer over my own knowledge, and while it’s not perfect, it’s the closest I’ve come to having a search engine built out of my own notes. Here’s how I did it…

Sorting out my vault

I had to organize my mess first

As you can see, my Obsidian vault is a mess. Nothing flows and only half the files are properly named. So the first step was trying to whip this into shape as much as I could before hopping over to NotebookLM. First, I had to identify what I could actually upload into a notebook — it doesn’t take images or Obsidian’s .canvas files, for example, so I’m sticking with my Markdown and PDF files.

Then, I also had to skim the content of my files. Many of them are either empty, duplicates, or a bit nonsensical. The point wasn’t to perfect everything before I even started this project, but rather to get my files into readable shape to make things a bit easier for the AI down the line. Throughout this process, I actually created a separate folder to hold all the files I had intended to upload to NotebookLM. Plus, I renamed some of the files to know what’s actually in them.

Setting up my notebook

NotebookLM makes this super quick and easy

Getting all my Obsidian files into NotebookLM was relatively simple, but it still required a bit of tedious manual work since there isn’t a plugin or sync feature to do it. I started by creating a notebook specifically for my vault, then added all my Markdown and PDF files that I had skimmed and prepped. The process felt more like prepping a dataset than organizing a folder, which was quite refreshing. Instead of worrying about where files live in my vault, dropping them into NotebookLM instantly made the AI treat everything like a searchable knowledge base — already giving me that summary of my sources before I even prompted anything.

How I’ve been using this combo

The ultimate personal search engine

Then it was time to start using my new notebook, and NotebookLM gives me several features to get the most out of it. I started with some prompts — you can extract just about anything from your vault notes with the right prompt. What are the main takeaways from chapter 4 of the novel I’m writing? What types of mindfulness practices have I researched? What is my most noted grocery list item? I can ask it anything and it will surface the relevant information. When you’re asking for more of an overview as opposed to a specific piece of information, I recommend getting more detailed with your prompt. For example:

What are the main themes across all the selected sources? Section them off, and keep each section short with a bulleted summarization.

The majority of my notes are related to a novel, but there are some miscellaneous notes in the mix too, such as SEO research. What I like most about prompting in NotebookLM is its follow-up question suggestions, even for summaries of my overarching Obsidian content. This lets me dive into a topic I forgot I had even researched. I also like prompting NotebookLM for comparisons between my notes; for writing in particular, this helps me avoid repeating myself or skipping important details.

The Mind Map is one of my favorite NotebookLM Studio features. This gives you a visual overview of the content, which is honestly easier for me to digest than text. Again, here you can see my main themes from this vault are related to the story I’m writing as well as random productivity topics. I love how easy it is to navigate — simply clicking on an arrow of a topic opens the next branch of key points. For anyone doing heavier academic work, I recommend creating a Study Guide or Briefing Doc (both via the Report feature). Report also gives you context-aware suggestions, for example, it suggested a Character Dossier for my notes, which was really helpful.

Upgrading my vault

Pairing my Obsidian vault with NotebookLM truly upgraded my vault. It didn’t necessarily help me organize it, but it did reframe scattered notes as searchable, therefore turning my vault into more than just storage. It’s not flawless since links within my text files aren’t readable, but this is a small trade-off. What matters is that now I can actually interact with my notes.