Google recently rolled out a preferred sources feature on the search results page. When a user selects a website as a preferred source, that site’s content is more likely to show up in Top Stories and gets highlighted as a preferred source within AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Here is a screenshot of how it looks.
This feature is available for all languages. Google noted that preferred sources apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that only domain-level and subdomain-level sites are eligible not subdirectories. So a site like:
- https://www.example.com/
- https://code.example.com/
would be eligible, but something like https://www.example.com/blog would not.
How To Check If Your Site Is Eligible
Before doing anything else, check whether your site actually shows up in the source preferences tool. If it does, you can guide users to select it as a preferred source.
How To Send Users Directly To The Source Preferences Tool
You can use this URL format to take users straight to the tool:
- https://google.com/preferences/source?q=Your_Website’s_URL
For example, if your site is example.com, the link would be:
- https://google.com/preferences/source?q=example.com
Sharing this link with your audience in a newsletter, on social, or on your site gives them a direct path to mark your domain as a preferred source, which could help increase your visibility in Top Stories and AI-generated results going forward.
Here is Google’s official documentation.
Have you checked whether your site is eligible for preferred sources yet?
