Overview
- Google announced a set of personalization features on Thursday, August 20, 2026 that link an embeddable Preferred Sources button for publishers with a chat-style Discover tuning tool and topic controls for Google News audio briefings.
- Publishers can embed the new Preferred Sources button using code from Google Search Central so readers can add a site without leaving the page and be returned to the article they were reading.
- Google says more than 600,000 unique sources have already been selected as Preferred Sources and that selected sites are more likely to appear in Top Stories and to receive a “preferred” badge in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- Discover will gain a natural-language, chatbot-style interface that lets users tap a three-dot menu on any card, tell Google in their own words which topics or links to show more or less of, and see the feed adjust immediately and remember requests; reporting shows the feature uses Gemini-like follow-ups and confirmations.
- The features are rolling out gradually to the Google app and Android devices in the coming days, publishers are watching to see if the tools restore click-throughs lost to AI-generated answers, and Google points to tests and earlier rollouts that grew preferred-source selections from about 345,000 in May to over 600,000 now.