Preferred Sources is a Google Search personalisation feature: readers can hand-pick specific sites to get priority treatment in Top Stories, AI Overviews, and AI Mode, either from a star icon next to Top Stories results or from their Google Account's Search personalisation settings. On 21 August 2026, Google extended it with a publisher-facing piece: an embeddable "Add as a preferred source on Google" button any site owner can put on their own pages to actively ask readers to select them. Over 600,000 sites have added it since it shipped.
What It Does for Readers
A reader who stars your site as a preferred source is telling Google's personalisation systems, not the whole internet, that they trust you. From then on, your content is more likely to surface for that person in Top Stories, and it can carry a "preferred" badge in AI Overviews and AI Mode results they see. Google has also said starred sources see roughly double the click-through rate from readers who picked them, which tracks: people click things they've already decided they trust.
The New Part: A Button You Add Yourself
Previously, getting starred meant a reader had to know to go looking for your site in their settings. The new button puts the ask directly on your page. Implementation is genuinely two lines:
<script async src="https://news.google.com/swg/js/v1/publisher.js"></script>
<div google-add-preferred-source-btn></div>
Google renders the button itself; the <div> is just where it mounts. Two optional attributes cover the obvious customisation needs:
data-theme="dark"(default islight)data-lang="en"to override the visitor's browser language
There's no Google News Publisher Center registration, no structured data, and no news-specific content requirement documented for using it. The one real constraint: eligibility is domain or subdomain level only. example.com and blog.example.com both work; a subdirectory path like example.com/blog does not get its own preferred-source identity separate from the root domain.
What It Doesn't Do
Adding the button isn't a shortcut around the fundamentals. Google is explicit that a preferred source still has to publish fresh, relevant content to appear at all - the star doesn't override normal relevance checks. And the feature rewards sites people already return to: a page a visitor lands on once from a random search gains nothing from asking them to star it on the way out. It's a loyalty mechanic, not a discovery one - closer in spirit to a "follow" button than an SEO lever.
Nothing here substitutes for the basics: our structured data guide still does the work of getting a page found and understood in the first place. This is what happens after that, for the readers who already came back.
Should Your Site Add It?
Worth doing if:
- You publish content people read more than once (a blog, guides, recurring analysis), not just static service pages.
- Your site sits at a root domain or subdomain (most sites do).
- You're already asking readers to subscribe, follow, or bookmark you anywhere else - this is one more low-effort version of the same ask.
Not worth engineering around if your site is entirely transactional pages with no returning-reader relationship to build on, the button has nothing to attach itself to.
We added ours to the bottom of AuditCrow's blog posts the same week Google shipped it, on the logic above: it costs two lines and does nothing until a reader who already trusts us clicks it. Full technical details, including the advanced JavaScript API for custom buttons, are in Google's publisher guide.
The Fast Way to Check the Rest
A loyalty button only pays off once the fundamentals are already solid. AuditCrow's free scan checks the technical and content basics that get a page found in the first place, and our technical SEO checklist covers the rest.