Google Now Lets Websites Ask You to Bookmark Them as a Favorite Source
Google has released a button that publishers can add to their own websites, letting readers say, in effect, "I want to see more from this site" across Google Search, Discover, and Google News. The button code was published in Google's documentation for website developers on August 20, 2026 (Google Search blog; TechCrunch).
When a reader presses the button on a publisher's site, that site is added to a personal list of preferred sources. Google says becoming a preferred source can drive more traffic to publishers' websites, citing earlier studies in which people were twice as likely to click through to a preferred source when one was available (TechCrunch).
Readers can also add a favorite publisher without the button by visiting Google's source preferences page at google.com/preferences and searching for a publisher by name or website (TechCrunch).
The on-site button is the latest step in a feature Google has been building gradually. In September 2025, Google added the ability to choose preferred news sources within Top Stories in Discover, which is Google's personalized feed of articles on the mobile app (Google Search blog). Readers can select preferred sources in Top Stories by searching for a topic in the news and clicking the icon to the right of the Top Stories section (Google Search blog). In May 2026, Google extended Preferred Sources into its AI experiences, including AI Mode and AI Overviews. These are the summaries Google generates at the top of some search results, written by pulling together information from across the web. The May update lets readers label preferred sources in their settings so those sites are highlighted directly within those AI-generated responses (Google Search blog; Google Search Central). As of that May launch, people across the web had selected over 345,000 unique sources through the feature (TechCrunch; Google Search blog).
Google has also published a Guide to Preferred Sources in its documentation, covering which sites qualify and how publishers can guide users to select their site as a preferred source (Google Search Central).
Alongside the button, Google said readers will soon be able to customize their Discover feed in the Google app using plain-language commands, accessed through the three-dot menu, to indicate topics they want to see more or less of. Android users will also be able to customize their audio daily briefings in the Google News app (TechCrunch).
Google has been actively updating the systems that surface content to readers. In February 2026, the company released a Discover core update, described as a broad update to the systems that surface articles in Discover (Google Search Central). It has also published a guide to optimizing for generative AI features on Search and Discover, including how to measure content performance via the Generative AI performance report in Search Console (Google Search Central).
The broader context here is the tension between Google's AI-driven search features and the publishers who supply the underlying content. AI Overviews and AI Mode pull together answers from publisher content, reducing the need for a reader to click through to the original source. Preferred Sources gives publishers a way to rebuild a direct relationship with readers, and gives readers a way to push specific sites into the AI-generated responses themselves. Google's own data, showing a 2x click-through increase for preferred sources, gives publishers a concrete reason to prompt their audiences to use the feature.
There are open questions worth flagging. The 345,000-source figure predates the on-site button, so we do not yet know how many people have adopted it since launch. The feature is opt-in for readers and requires publishers to actively promote it, which means larger publishers with loyal, returning audiences are better positioned to benefit than smaller outlets or those that depend on being found through search. And while Preferred Sources can elevate a chosen site within AI-generated responses, it does not change how Google's systems decide which sources to pull from in the first place. A reader who prefers a given outlet may see it highlighted, but the underlying process remains opaque.
What the feature does enable is straightforward: a reader who takes the time to designate preferred sources gets a more consistent signal across Search, Discover, News, and now AI Mode, and publishers get a measurable, if modest, traffic boost for their part. Whether that is enough to offset the broader shift as AI-generated answers absorb more of the search experience is a separate question that the button alone does not answer.
