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.
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