Tools AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-21

One click on a news site now tells Google to show you more of it — and you stay on the page you were reading

On 20 August Google released embed code that lets any publisher put a "Preferred Source" button directly on its own pages. Clicking it marks that site as a favourite in the reader's Google account, which then surfaces it more prominently in Top Stories, Discover, Google News, and inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. The change is small and entirely about friction. The feature itself has existed since May, but until now a reader had to leave the article, find Google's settings page, make the change there and then find their way back. The button does it in place and returns the reader to the spot they were at. Google says more than 600,000 individual sources have been picked this way so far, up from over 345,000 in May, and that readers who set preferences are roughly twice as likely to click through to one of them. Publishers get the code from Google's Search Central documentation. Nothing happens automatically: every site has to add the button and every reader has to press it.

Why it mattersPublishers have spent two years watching machine-written answers absorb the traffic that used to arrive from search, and this is Google's offer to the people most damaged by it — a way to be chosen deliberately rather than only ranked algorithmically. Whether it repairs much is a fair question, because it only works on readers who already know a site and care enough to press a button, which is exactly the audience a publisher was least likely to lose. But it is worth knowing as a reader too. It is one of the few switches you actually control over what Google shows you, and unlike most personalisation settings it reaches into the AI answers as well as the blue links.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

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One click on a news site now tells Google to show you more of it — and you stay on the page you were reading

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