Google Throws a Bone to Publishers - DTNS 5337

**Tom Merritt** (0:09)
This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, August 21st, 2026 We tell you what you need to know, give you important context and try to help each other understand.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (0:18)
Today, Google makes it easier for news publishers to get you to add them to preferred sources. This will make them show up higher in search and more often in AI overviews.

**Tom Merritt** (0:27)
A little bone, maybe a big bone. I don't know. We'll talk about it. But it is being thrown at the publishers. I'm Tom Merritt.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (0:33)
Back with it now.

**Tom Merritt** (0:34)
Let's start with what you need to know with that big story.
Yeah, so Google launched an easier way to add preferred sources to your search, Google News or that Google Discover feed on mobile.
If you didn't remember, preferred sources launched in May. I had kind of forgot and had to go back and look, did I add any preferred sources? Turned out, I added eight of them back in May and totally forgot I did it. So hey, here's a reminder. You might have some preferred sources settings. The preferred sources button is the new thing though. This will show up if you're on the publisher's website. So you're reading a news website and you'll see that preferred sources button and you'll say, gosh, I really like this news website. I would like it to be one of my preferred sources on Google. And then you click that button and it will add it to your preferred sources list in your Google account, right? Now, obviously, you have to be logged in to Google. So if you're using Chrome, that's going to be easier.
But it is meant to make it easier. Publishers had a badge before that they could use, but it would send you to Google's source preferences tool. And then you had to add the publisher yourself. So this makes it a lot faster and easier and lets you stay on the publisher's website. It's not going to kick you out to anything. You just press that button. Keep reading your story. Preferred sources show up more often in top stories than AI-generated responses. I think that's the other thing to emphasize is when you are getting a Gemini response, an AI overview or even in just the AI's tab on search, your preferred sources will be used more often if you have them. In addition, Google is also adding a feature to Google Discover that when you select the three dot menu, or sometimes it will show you a chat prompt, you can tell it in natural language, hey, I want to see more K-pop topics, or I'd like to see less about enraged people, and it'll try to show you more or less of that. You can also curate your daily audio briefing in the Google News app. If you use that, you can tell it to choose specific topics, and it will also now link out to full articles more often. The big one that the industry is focusing on is the preferred sources because that is a boon to publishers. I don't know how many people are going to use this, but I guess enough people can use it that it might make a little bit of a difference.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (2:57)
That's what I was kind of curious, and you mentioned throwing the publishers a bone, and of course, given that AI summarization, AI overviews and everything like that are, I assume, I don't know the numbers on this disrupting, kind of like the traditional relationship between publishers and users. Definitely disrupting. Definitely disrupting. I was actually, as you were speaking, introspecting on how I use these things. I actually got a new phone recently and I liked it to not, because it's a Samsung, I liked it to not put Google Discover in that left hand side. So I even more removed myself from that just because I, and I'm doing that for a very specific reason. I'm doing that because I'm a little bit tired of the thing that, to be honest, the preferred sources is supposed to be helping me with, and that is to get more results of things that I actually trust and care about, and less of what I perceive to be not necessarily slot, but just things I really didn't care about and don't need in my eyeballs in the morning.
I don't know whether that makes me an outlier or whether that makes me maybe part of the problem? But I do agree with you that, and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this feature. This is a great feature, to be honest with you, like giving people choice and allowing people to be specific about what they want to use. But that's always the problem with features like this, is that there's a lot of good intention there, discoverability, and even just the entropy of users to use something, anomaly is a very helpful feature. There's not really a downside, I guess one could say, not only to using this, but a lot of it is entropy and discoverability. Are we, is this too little, too late? I don't know, but I would actually be a little pessimistic about whether this brings people back to viewing even their preferred sources on these different surfaces since we're all kind of been inundated with this stuff for a while. I don't know, what do you think?