Google is giving publishers a more direct way to ask loyal readers for help as AI changes how traffic moves across the web. On Thursday, the company made a new Preferred Sources button available for online publishers to place on their own websites.
The feature lets a reader mark a publisher as a favorite source. Once selected, that source can be shown more often across Google Search, Discover, and Google News.
How the Preferred Sources button works
The new button is meant to sit on a publisher’s website, where regular readers are already engaging with the brand. Instead of asking users to leave the site and find a separate settings page, publishers can now give readers a direct action to take while they are already on the page.
When a reader chooses a site as a preferred source, Google can use that signal when surfacing links in its products. The core idea is simple: if a person already knows and trusts a publication, Google wants to make it easier for that person to find that publication again.
The feature is not limited to one surface. Google said preferred publishers can appear more often in Search, Discover, and Google News. The same preference also connects to Google’s AI experiences, including AI Mode and AI Overviews.
Readers can also add a site another way. Google’s source preferences page lets users search for a publisher by name or website and select it from there.
Why publishers care about the change
The rollout comes as AI-powered search features have become a traffic concern for websites that depend on readers clicking through. When answers, summaries, and discovery surfaces keep more activity inside Google’s own products, publishers have fewer chances to bring readers back to their pages.
Google is presenting Preferred Sources as one answer to that pressure. If a reader has already chosen a publisher, Google says that choice can improve the chance that the publisher’s link is visible when relevant content is available.
The company said becoming a preferred source can send more traffic to publishers’ websites. In earlier studies, Google found that people are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source when available.
That number matters because it describes the practical value of the button. The feature does not promise to solve every traffic problem caused by AI search, but it gives publishers a concrete prompt they can put in front of readers: choose us as a source you want Google to show more often.
Where the feature came from
Preferred Sources is not entirely new. Google rolled it out in May to its AI experiences, including AI Mode and AI Overviews. The option had already been available in Top Stories.
As of May’s launch, Google said people across the web had selected over 345,000 unique sources through the method. The new publisher button extends that system by moving the preference action onto publisher websites themselves.
That shift is important for the reader relationship. A publisher does not have to hope that a user finds the source preferences page elsewhere. It can now present the action at the moment a reader is already showing interest in its work.
For readers, the benefit is also direct. Preferred Sources is a way to shape the information that appears across Google products without building a feed from scratch. It tells Google that some publishers should carry extra weight when links are available.
Discover and Google News are getting more personal
Google also said readers will soon be able to customize their Discover feed in Google’s app using their own words. The interaction will happen through any three-dot menu in the feed.
Instead of choosing from a narrow set of controls, readers will be able to tell Google what topics they want to see more or less of using natural language commands. Google said this will help refine the feed in real time.
That update fits into a broader movement toward user-controlled recommendation systems. The source article notes that a number of top social media apps have recently launched AI-powered tools that let people fine-tune the content recommended to them.
Google is applying a similar idea to Discover. The feed becomes less of a fixed stream and more of a surface that can respond to direct reader instructions.
Audio briefings are part of the same push
The personalization effort also reaches Google News. Google said Android users will be able to customize their audio daily briefings in the Google News app.
Taken together, the updates point in the same direction: Google wants readers to give clearer signals about the sources and topics they prefer. For publishers, the most immediate part of that strategy is the Preferred Sources button, because it can live directly on their own sites.
The larger question is whether readers will use these controls often enough to change traffic patterns in a meaningful way. For now, publishers have a new tool they can promote to their audience, and readers have another way to tell Google which voices they want to see more often.