Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Preferred Sources expanded globally last month, helping users spot their favorite sites in Top Stories results.
- Google is now differentiating links to Preferred Sources in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- AI Overviews and AI Mode results will start showing link carousels to sites, social media posts, and forums in certain situations.
Google has a tool called Preferred Sources that lets you pick trusted websites to appear in the Top Stories section of search results. The feature first debuted in the US and India last year, and became more widely available last month. It’s available globally in all languages supported by Google Search. However, users are seeing Top Stories less often thanks to the emergence of AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search. Starting today, Preferred Sources will now appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, helping you spot the articles that inform Google’s AI Search results.
Google announced the rollout in a blog post today, noting that the process for choosing Preferred Sources for AI Overviews and AI Mode is the same as traditional Search. Open your Google Search personalization settings and click search preferences. You can click this link to jump straight into your Google account’s search preferences page. Then, you can search by website name or site URL to add a publication to your Preferred Sources list.
As of now, these Preferred Sources will be highlighted in the source list for AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search. For example you can click the buttons below to set Android Authority as a favorite source in Google Discover and a preferred source in Google Search.
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The change means that Preferred Sources will now display a “Preferred” badge in a list of source links in AI Search. Usually there are many site links listed in a single AI Overview result or AI Mode response, and Preferred Sources help you sift through them.
In a related shift, Google is starting to show link carousels in some AI Overviews or AI Mode responses. These will highlight links to websites, social media posts, or forums, based on the situation. The company says these carousels will appear when a user searches for a “developing topic.” The idea is that AI Search results will display timely articles for queries that concern ongoing situations with real-time updates.
Preferred Sources will be distinguished in these link carousels, too. To help you find important sites in traditional Google Search results, Google is adding a “Highly cited” badge to more articles that have been linked to by other websites.
Preferred Sources are a neat fix for complaints about weaker Google Search results. However, they were becoming less useful as search results pivoted from showing Top Stories carousels to displaying AI Overviews or AI Mode results. Now that these selected sites will appear prominently in AI Search results, it’ll be easier to find the links you actually care about in AI Overview or AI Mode source lists.
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