Tech and AI
Publishers get a button for their own pages that lets a reader pin them as a preferred source in search results
By Staff Writer | 22 August 2026
Google published three personalisation changes on 20 August. The one that matters to anyone who puts content on the web is an embeddable button: a reader clicks it on the publisher's own page, the site is added as a preferred source, and the reader is returned to the point in the page they had reached. Preferred sources are then favoured in Top Stories, in AI Overviews and in AI Mode. The company says more than 600,000 unique sources have been selected so far.
The button is described as an interactive one that publishers can embed on their pages, and the code for it sits in the company's search documentation for publishers to take. That is the whole of the mechanism. What makes it worth a professional adviser's attention is not the engineering but where the choice then applies.
The choice follows the reader into the answer panels
A preferred source is not a bookmark. The announcement states that readers more easily find their favoured publications in Top Stories, in AI Overviews and in AI Mode, which places the setting inside the generated answers rather than only in the list of links beneath them. A publisher that persuades a reader to press the button once is therefore asking for a standing preference that carries into the part of the results page a reader is most likely to read and least likely to scroll past.
When readers click this button, it adds the site as a Preferred Source on Google and immediately directs them back to where they left off on the publisher's page.
Mrinalini Loew, General Manager, Google Search Ecosystem
The return to the reader's place in the page is a small detail with a commercial point behind it. A button that navigated the reader away would be pressed by very few people, because the cost of pressing it would be losing the article. Removing that cost is what turns the request into one a reader might actually grant.
Two more controls, both aimed at the same thing
The second change is to the Discover feed. In the coming days, the company says, a reader using the Google app will be able to open the three dot menu on any item and say, in ordinary words, which topics or links they want more or less of. The feed is to adjust while they are using it and to remember what was asked.
The third is audio. Daily briefings in the Google News app on Android can now be curated by choosing particular topics, and the announcement states that the briefings carry clear source attribution and links out to the full articles. It also says that publishers taking part in the company's news pilot produce deeper coverage of the leading stories inside those briefings.
Taken together the three changes point the same way: the reader is being asked to state a preference explicitly, and the stated preference is then applied across search, the feed and the audio product.
What it means for anyone who publishes
Three practical points follow. The first is that the button has to be put on the page by the publisher, so a site that does nothing gets nothing; this is an opt-in that costs a small piece of implementation work and nothing else. The second is that the value of it accrues to publications a reader already knows they want, which favours a title with a settled readership over one that depends on being found by accident. The third is that the setting reaches into AI Overviews and AI Mode, so a publisher that has been watching generated answers with some alarm now has one lever, however modest, over what those answers draw on for a particular reader.
The announcement gives no reason for the change, offers no figure for how often a preferred source is actually surfaced, and makes no claim at all about referral traffic. The single number it does give is that people have already selected more than 600,000 unique sources. That is a count of sources chosen, not of readers choosing them, and it should not be read as either.