Google launches publisher-facing tools to help sites recover from AI search traffic drain

Google has unveiled new tools aimed at helping publishers offset the traffic losses that have accompanied the expansion of AI-powered search features. The moves represent an attempt to address mounting concerns from content creators about how AI summaries and overviews are directing users away from their sites.

A button for trusted sources#

The centerpiece of Google's new offering is an embeddable "Preferred Sources" button that publishers can place directly on their websites. Visitors can click this button to mark a site as a favorite, signaling to Google's systems that they want to encounter that publisher more prominently in Search, Discover, and Google News results.

This feature builds on a capability Google introduced in May, when it first made Preferred Sources available within AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Top Stories. According to the company, the initial rollout was successful—users have already flagged over 345,000 unique sources as preferred. Research from Google indicates that people are roughly twice as likely to click through to a source marked as preferred when such options are presented.

Readers can also manage their preferences manually by visiting Google's source preferences page to search for and add publishers by name or website.

Personalization gets an upgrade#

Beyond the Preferred Sources button, Google is expanding personalization controls across its properties. Users will soon be able to customize their Discover feed using natural language—rather than selecting from predefined categories, they can tap a menu and simply tell Google which topics they want to see more or less of. The system then refines recommendations in real time based on these conversational inputs.

Android users will gain similar customization options for audio briefings in the Google News app, allowing them to shape what content gets read aloud to them.

Broader industry trend#

Google is not alone in this approach. Multiple social media platforms have recently launched user-controlled algorithms that give people fine-grained control over recommendations, reflecting a wider shift toward putting algorithmic curation in users' hands.