Google Adds a Button That Lets Readers Pick Their Own Favourite Sources
Publishers can now embed a Preferred Sources button on their own site. Google says readers are twice as likely to click through to a source they have marked as preferred.
Google announced on 20 August that publishers can embed a Preferred Sources button directly on their own websites. A reader clicks it once, and that site then shows up more often for them across Google Search, Discover and Google News. It is Google’s answer, or at least a gesture toward one, to the traffic that AI Overviews and AI Mode have taken away from the websites those answers are built on.
The underlying feature is not new. Google rolled Preferred Sources into Top Stories, then extended it to its AI experiences including AI Mode and AI Overviews back in May. What changes now is where you can set it. Previously you had to go to Google’s own source preferences page and search for a publisher by name. Now the publisher can put the switch in front of you at the moment you are already reading them, which is a very different conversion rate. Google says people across the web have already selected more than 345,000 unique sources this way, and that in its own earlier studies readers were twice as likely to click through to a source they had marked as preferred. Alongside this, Google is adding natural-language control of the Discover feed, where you tap a three-dot menu and simply tell it what you want more or less of, plus customisable audio briefings in the Google News app on Android.
The wider pattern is worth naming. Search used to decide for you what was relevant, and the only lever you had was your choice of words. Over the last year the major platforms have started handing that lever back, with several social apps launching user-controlled algorithms in recent months. Google’s version is narrower than it looks, though. Preferred Sources nudges ranking, it does not guarantee placement, and it does nothing about the underlying dynamic where an AI summary answers the question so completely that nobody clicks anything. A fair reading is that Google is offering publishers a way to keep their most loyal readers while the casual traffic keeps leaking away.
What this means for you: as a reader, this is a small setting with a real payoff. Spend five minutes at google.com/preferences/source adding the handful of publications you actually trust, and your search results and Discover feed both improve. As someone who runs a website, the button is free and takes minutes to add, and it is currently one of very few levers you have over AI-era search traffic. Either way, treat it as damage control rather than a fix. The clicks that AI answers absorb are not coming back because of a button.
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Source: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/original-high-quality-content-search/
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