Hi everyone. I've been trying out NotebookLM to help organize research notes from some technical PDFs and documentation I uploaded (mostly about Airflow deployment patterns and dbt project structures). I'm running into a consistent issue and I'm worried I'm doing something wrong, or maybe this is a known limitation.
When I ask a question that seems to pull information directly from my sources, the answer will often state a fact clearly from the PDFs but won't cite which document or page it came from. The "citation" button just isn't there. For example, I asked "What are the recommended parameters for a production Airflow executor?" and the response listed specific configs that I know are in my uploaded deployment guide, but no sources were linked.
This is a problem for my workflow because I need to trace recommendations back to the original source doc to verify context. I can't just trust the output without a reference—I've been burned before by assumptions in data pipelines!
My setup:
* I've uploaded 3 PDFs and 2 markdown files.
* They are all text-based (no complex scans).
* I'm using the grounded response mode.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a specific way to phrase questions or format sources to make citations more reliable? I really want this tool to work for technical documentation review, but missing citations feels like a critical failure for research. Any advice would be appreciated.