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Google Gives Publishers a 'Preferred Sources' Button to Fight AI-Driven Traffic Losses (techcrunch.com) 24

Posted by BeauHD from the throwing-publishers-a-button dept.
Google is giving publishers a new way to fight declining referral traffic from AI-powered search by letting them embed a "Preferred Sources" button that readers can use to favor their sites across Search, Discover, and Google News. "The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites they know and trust when they're searching for content or interacting with Google's AI to learn about a topic or read the latest news," reports TechCrunch. "As of May's launch, the company said that people across the web had already selected over 345,000 unique sources through this method." From the report: Becoming a preferred source can drive more traffic to publishers' websites, Google said. In earlier studies, it found that people are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source when available. By offering publishers these additional tools, Google is trying to assuage the damage that the rapid growth of AI-powered search features has had on traffic-dependent businesses.

Alongside the new button, Google said that readers will soon be able to customize their Discover feed in Google's app in their own words. To use this feature, readers will tap any three-dot menu in the feed and then tell Google what topics they'd like to see more or less of, using natural language commands. This helps Google refine the feed in real time.
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Google Gives Publishers a 'Preferred Sources' Button to Fight AI-Driven Traffic Losses More

Google Gives Publishers a 'Preferred Sources' Button to Fight AI-Driven Traffic Losses

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  • The article is dated yesterday, but I've seen the button on the Guardian website for months. (I'm not a regular reader, but I like their crossword.)

  • For how much? (Score:4, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday August 21, 2026 @11:29AM (#66300066)

    AI: "Dat's a nice little web site ya' got there buddy. Shame if someting were to happen to it."

  • Options missing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ip_vjl ( 410654 ) on Friday August 21, 2026 @11:43AM (#66300100) Homepage

    The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites they know and trust

    should read:

    The idea is to make it easier for Google to know which sites to more aggressively steal content from in order to power their AI.

    Interestingly, if Google was about giving choice - they'd give you an option to turn off AI answers entirely in the search. But they don't. But, at least they have safe search enabled so you don't accidentally see a nipple.

    • Interestingly, if Google was about giving choice - they'd give you an option to turn off AI answers entirely in the search. But they don't. But, at least they have safe search enabled so you don't accidentally see a nipple.

      This is the thing that has made me so angry with modern SaaS software. My favorite example is that I pay quickbooks a monthly fee, and there is no way I can find to make it stop popping up giant intrusive ads for their other services every single time I open it. I hate them so much.

      • and there is no way I can find to make it stop popping up giant intrusive ads for their other services every single time I open it.

        Just like Firefox. There is no easy way to turn off being harassed by an intrusive pop-up telling me about a new update.

        There used to be. It was a simple checkbox. But somewhere along the way someone had to justify their existence and removed that simple checkbox in favor of harassment.

      • Do you pay for Google search?! If not, it is not SaaS. As the saying goes, you are the product.

    • This is exactly it. It has nothing to do with publishers. If users aren't clicking on web links, Google no longer gets information about which sources are high quality or preferred. Without that signal for weighting sources, their results are going to collapse into SEO spam. And as Google morphs into an AI question and answer bot, poor weighting will no longer surface to users as bad links, it'll just makes Google's AI look dumb.

  • All that is old is now new again (Score:4, Interesting)

    by crmarvin42 ( 652893 ) on Friday August 21, 2026 @11:45AM (#66300106)
    The reason Google rose to dominance is that their algorithm accounted for trustworthiness. You didnâ(TM)t need to know the site that had your answer, Google knew it, and ranked it at the top of your results. This is basically asking you to manually do what Google historically did automatically, which is to vet websites that might contain answers to your queries. All so that they can inject LLMs into a process that does not need them. Yet one more reason Iâ(TM)m glad I ditched Google.

    • Re:All that is old is now new again (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jason Earl ( 1894 ) on Friday August 21, 2026 @12:38PM (#66300208) Homepage Journal

      There was nothing automatic about Google's trustworthiness. It simply counted up links that lead back to a particular page. If it had more links it was (supposedly) a better page. Almost immediately webmasters around the world started gaming the system. Google still restricts some of the things my account can do for hidden links that were added to some ads on websites that I ran in like 2001. GoDaddy and all of the other big web hosting companies of that era all rose to prominence on the strength of gaming the PageRank system.

      I am sure that other industries tell the same story.

      PageRank might seem trustworthy to you, but that's only because you weren't trying to game the system back in the day. I can assure you that, right from the start, people were abusing PageRank in precisely the same way that upsets you now. The only difference was that registering a domain back then cost $70 for two years, and you probably created the links you used to game the system by writing Perl. That raised the barrier to entry significantly. However, there was still real money to be made in that arena, and whether the winners paid Google directly, or paid for back links to their content (or both), I can guarantee you that the road to your trust was paved in money.

      In the end Google has decided that the most reliable way to have publishers show that their information is trustworthy is to force them to pay for the privilege. Coincidentally that also happens to be the method that makes Google the most money. For years an entire SEO industry has thrived around the idea that if you pay someone enough money they can trick Google to steal your information instead of your competitors. Now we are finally at the endgame and Google doesn't even send traffic. They simply summarize the information for their customers. Chances are excellent that you don't even leave the google.com domain.

      Google's competitors are simply doing the same thing at a different domain. All of them make their money by charging publishers to show up prominently in search ranks. Whether you are rooting for Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia it's Big Brother all of the way down.

      • Except that non-ai search engines still work, whereas Google does not, unless you manually step in to tell it what to do. Still a reversion. And not an unavoidable one

        • That is a very good point. duckduckgo.com (to use an example) does not summarize the search results for you, and, once you know what to look for the ads are clearly marked. To be honest, purchasing ads on duckduckgo.com is likely a sign of good taste on the part of the advertiser as well. Honestly, I hadn't even considered using a non-Google search option for a long time. That is almost certainly part of the problem. Thanks for your response.

          • I used duckduckgo for a while. I switched to Kagi last year. Not everyone is willing to pay, up front, for search. But if you do, the experience is even better, because there are no ads to watch out for at all. Everything is search results.

            • I didn't even know about Kagi. In fact, it has been a long time since I have even considered using someone besides Google. I just resigned myself to the idea that things were forever broken. Thanks for the insight.

      • The PageRank system, even as you described it, is in fact fully automatic. I the Google Search user, don't have to do anything to adjust the score, PageRank does it all by itself.

        The new system is manual, I the user have to click a button to tell Google I want links from that site.

        That's not OK with me.

        • The new system is simply another set of inputs. You will still get search results even if you don't click on anything. In fact, I would bet that actual user interaction with this new system is going to be very small. Most of the input that Google will get will be people trying to game the system.

  • New Youtube Slogan (Score:3)

    by allo ( 1728082 ) on Friday August 21, 2026 @01:36PM (#66300346)

    Don't forget to like, subscribe and prefer us as source for your Google searches!

  • the button would say "keep scraping this loser's website"
  • How about google just keep the AI mode as AI Mode and leave the search to just return sites.

    I am sick of having to scroll down to find what I am looking for.
  • So I can't block "YouTube", nor the evil "X", or the pool-of-cess known as "reddit"? What about the dozen or so publishers that gladly sell links and call them "partners"? and on and on and on.

    One mans feature, is just another mans PR stunt. This action by Google is the later.

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