Google gives publishers a new way to fight AI-driven traffic losses

Google is giving publishers a new tool to fight back against the traffic drain from AI search. On Thursday, it opened up a “Preferred Sources” button that publishers can embed on their own sites, letting readers mark them as sources they want surfaced more often across Search, Discover, and Google News.

The company already rolled out Preferred Sources in May inside its AI products, including AI Mode and AI Overviews. It had also been available in Top Stories. Now Google is moving the same idea onto publisher sites, where readers can choose a favorite outlet without hunting through settings first.

The pitch is straightforward: if people already trust a site, Google wants to make that site easier to find when they search or when they use Google’s AI features to catch up on a topic or the news. Google says that as of the May launch, people had selected more than 345,000 unique sources. It also says earlier studies found users are twice as likely to click through when a preferred source is available.

That matters because the complaint from publishers has been the same for months: AI-powered search features are keeping readers inside Google’s products and away from traffic-dependent sites. This new button doesn’t change that basic tension. It does, though, give publishers one more way to nudge loyal readers to actively ask for them.

Google is also adding more controls to Discover. Soon, readers will be able to open the three-dot menu in the feed and type, in their own words, what they want to see more or less of. Android users will get a similar option for audio daily briefings in the Google News app. The company says these changes help it tune feeds in real time, and they fit a wider trend: social apps are increasingly handing users tools to shape the algorithms that shape them.