Google Gives Websites a Button to Fight Back Against Lost AI Traffic

The problem this is trying to solve

When Google's search results started including AI-written summaries at the top of the page, a lot of people stopped clicking through to the actual news websites — why visit the source when the answer is already right there? That's been a real financial hit for publishers, who rely on those clicks for advertising 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 gets 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 back in May, when it let people mark preferred sources specifically inside its 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 are about twice as likely to actually click through to a source when it's one of 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-out requests instead of just tapping thumbs up or down, and Android users will get similar personalization for the audio news briefings inside the Google News app.

Why it matters

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