Google Releases an Embeddable Preferred Sources Button for Publishers

On August 20, 2026, Google updated personalization across Search, Discover, and Google News¹. At the center is an interactive “Preferred Sources” button that publishers can embed on their own pages¹.

When a reader clicks it, the site is added as a Preferred Source on Google and the reader is sent immediately back to where they left off on the publisher’s page¹. The announcement was published under the name of Mrinalini Loew, General Manager of Google Search Ecosystem¹.

One click to prioritize a site

According to Google, publications saved as preferred sources become easier for readers to find in Top Stories, AI Overviews, and AI Mode¹. Publishers, in Google’s framing, gain a more seamless way to connect with readers across Google¹.

How the effect is described differs by source. The announcement itself goes only as far as readers “more easily” finding these publications; it does not address traffic¹. TechCrunch, however, reports that Google said becoming a preferred source can drive more traffic to a publisher’s website, and that in earlier studies the company found readers are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source when one is available². That 2x figure comes from Google’s own earlier research, and TechCrunch’s article gives no denominator or conditions for it.

On scale, Google states that “people have already selected more than 600,000 unique sources”¹. That figure is the company’s own count, and the announcement gives no denominator, time period, or country breakdown.

Adoption is straightforward: publishers can find the new “Preferred Source” button code in Google’s Search Central documentation¹.

Designating preferred sources is not itself new. What is new here is the embeddable button as a path to it¹ — readers can now register a site while reading an article, rather than hunting for a Google settings screen.

Discover will take plain-language instructions

Two further changes were announced alongside it.

The first is Discover feed tuning. Google says tuning the feed will become as easy as texting a friend¹. Tapping any three-dot menu in the Google app feed lets you tell Google, in your own words, exactly which topics or links you want more or less of; the feed adjusts on the fly and remembers the requests¹. The examples given are kitchen renovation ideas limited to eco-friendly ones, and weekend road trip videos with no camping¹.

This one is coming “in the coming days” and was not available at announcement¹.

The second is audio. In the Google News app on Android, daily audio briefings can now be curated by choosing specific topics, with clear source attribution and links out to full articles¹. Google says the range of publishers participating in its news AI pilot program means briefings will include deeper dives into key stories¹. The announcement explicitly limits this to the Google News app on Android¹.

More pages, and which sources get seen

Another related figure landed on August 20. Pew Research Center published an analysis showing that, among 490,000 English-language pages sampled from Common Crawl, over a third of those with post-ChatGPT publication dates carried signs of AI authorship.

More pages and which pages reach readers are separate problems. What Google built here hands part of the second one to the reader’s explicit choice. Alongside whatever the ranking algorithm selects, there is now a path for a reader to designate a publication once and have it prioritized.

The day before, on August 19, Google also added a set of study features across Search and Gemini, expanding what runs inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. The more space AI Overviews and AI Mode occupy in results, the more it matters whether a given publication appears there. Preferred sources is positioned as making reader-designated publications easier to find within that surface¹.

Browsers are working the same seam. On August 18, Mozilla added an Exa partnership to Firefox’s Smart Window so users can pull current web information with citations without navigating to a separate results page. Both are answers to the same question: how to close the distance between the layer that summarizes and the page underneath.

What publishers actually do

For anyone running a site, the actionable part of this announcement is narrow: pull the button code from the Search Central documentation and decide where on the article page it goes¹.

Placement and frequency are the real judgment calls. Because readers are returned to where they left off¹, a mid-article or end-of-article placement need not break reading. What the announcement itself does not carry is any figure for the effect¹. The 2x click-through rate Google cited from earlier research reached the public through TechCrunch, without conditions attached². Measuring it means watching search and Discover referrals before and after adoption yourself.

The announcement makes no mention of availability or language support in Japan.