Google gives websites a button to fight back against lost AI traffic

The problem this is meant to solve

When Google's search results started showing AI-written summaries at the top of the page, many people stopped clicking through to the actual news websites — why visit a source when the answer is already right there? That has been a real financial blow for publishers, who depend on those clicks for ad revenue.

What Google just launched

Google is now giving website owners a "Preferred Sources" button they can add to their own pages. If a reader clicks it, that site is marked as one of their favorites, and Google will then try to show that source more often across three of its products: regular Search, the Discover feed (the scrollable news feed on Android phones), and Google News.

This builds on something Google already did in May, when people could mark preferred sources specifically within the AI-generated summaries. Google says more than 345,000 different websites have already been chosen as someone's preferred source since then, and that people click through to a source roughly twice as often when it's among their preferred picks.

What else is coming

Google also announced two related updates: people will soon be able to tell the Discover feed what kind of content they want using plain, typed requests instead of just tapping thumbs up or down, and Android users will get similar personalization for the audio news briefings in the Google News app.

Why it matters

This is Google trying to strike a balance: keep offering fast AI answers (which people clearly value) while giving publishers a lifeline to stay visible and get clicks. Whether a single button meaningfully offsets the traffic AI summaries have taken away remains an open question — but it's Google's most direct response yet to publishers who have been asking for one.