How-to Guides

How to Run a Quick Analysis

Quick Analysis is the fastest path from a question to an answer. Use it when you need a read on a brand, client, or topic right now and don’t want to set up a saved persona first. You need a logged-in NewsbookLM account to use it.

Step 1: Navigate to Quick Analysis

From the sidebar, click Quick Analysis. You’ll see a configuration card where you choose what to analyze and how.

Step 2: Choose a persona or enter details for an ad-hoc analysis

At the top of the form, select an existing persona from the dropdown if you’ve already created one — this pre-fills keywords, industry, and other settings. If you don’t have a persona yet, or you just need a one-time check, choose Ad-Hoc Analysis instead. Ad-hoc mode asks for a brand or company name and an industry or category, both required.

Step 3: Add optional details to improve relevance

In ad-hoc mode, two optional fields help NewsbookLM filter for relevance: a short description of what you’re looking for (for example, “product launch news and competitive moves”), and a website URL for the brand, which gives the AI more context about the business. Saved personas carry their own keywords and context automatically, so you generally won’t need these.

You can also adjust the date range (defaults to the last 7 days if left on “No timeframe”), toggle which data sources to search (News API and RSS feeds are active; Gmail is coming soon), set language and region filters, and pick how many articles to analyze, up to your plan’s daily limit.

Step 4: Click Analyze and wait for results

Click Generate Analysis. NewsbookLM searches your selected sources, pulls in matching articles, and runs each one through relevance scoring and summarization. A progress indicator shows how many articles were found, how many have been analyzed, and how many came back relevant. This typically takes well under a minute. If you need to stop partway through, click Cancel.

Step 5: Review relevance scoring and the analysis summary

When the run finishes, you’ll see two things: a written summary structured around your briefing template’s sections (executive summary, key developments, and so on), and a list of the individual articles that were found. Each article carries a relevance badge — green for relevant, orange for not relevant — so you can scan the list and focus only on what matters.

Step 6: Export or share the result

Every Quick Analysis is saved automatically and shows up on the Reports page. From the results screen you can also copy the summary to your clipboard or send it by email directly. If you ran an ad-hoc analysis and want to reuse the same settings later, click Save as Persona to turn it into a reusable profile — see How to Create a Client Persona.

For a full breakdown of every field on this screen, see the Quick Analysis: Field Reference.