Google has launched a “Preferred Source” button that publishers can add directly to their websites.
Clicking it tells Google to show that site more often in Top Stories, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. The reader lands right back on the article they were reading, with no detour through Google’s own settings pages.
Preferred Sources as a ranking signal has existed since mid-2025, first in beta, then in the US and India, before expanding to every language worldwide by April 2026.
Getting readers to use it took real effort. They had to search for a topic, find a small star icon next to Top Stories, and then manually choose publishers from a list buried in Google’s interface.
Honestly, how often do you go looking through a search engine’s settings just to find a specific website? Almost nobody did. As a result, most publishers had little chance of getting the boost, even when readers already liked their content.
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The new button removes that friction. A reader browsing a publisher’s site sees an “Add to Preferred Sources” button right on the article page. Tapping it opens a short Google confirmation screen showing the publisher’s name and a single “Add” button.
One more tap, and the reader is dropped straight back onto the same article, with a small on-page confirmation that the site has been added and a link to manage preferred sources going forward. The entire flow happens without leaving the publisher’s page for more than a couple of seconds.
Google says the shift is working. Readers who mark a site as preferred are twice as likely to click through to it again afterward, and the adoption numbers back that up.
In December 2025, Google reported around 90,000 unique sources selected. By April 2026, that had grown to 200,000. This week’s figure stands at over 600,000, tripling in just a few months.
For publishers, AI Overviews and AI Mode have been widely blamed for cutting referral traffic across the industry, with some sites reporting Discover clicks dropping by as much as 98% after Google’s December 2025 core update.
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Preferred Sources gives publishers a way to convert loyal readers into a permanent visibility boost, using nothing more than a button on their page.
Google has not said whether the 600,000 figure counts individual publishers or individual pages and sub-sites that could belong to the same publisher. It also has not said over what stretch of time that growth happened, only that the number has tripled since April 2026.
The direction, however, is clear. Google is asking publishers to do more of the work of earning visibility themselves, rather than leaving it entirely to the algorithm.
