Overview
- Google began rolling the change on Wednesday and now shows user-marked Preferred Sources inside AI Overviews and AI Mode so selected sites are clearly labeled in AI answers.
- The company says more than 345,000 unique sites have been chosen as Preferred Sources and that users click Preferred links at about twice the rate of other links, according to its internal figures.
- For some developing topics Google will display a prominent article carousel beneath AI summaries that highlights Preferred Sources and the company plans a separate carousel to surface forum and social perspectives.
- Google is expanding its "Highly Cited" badge to more web articles and will flag when a story explicitly references a Highly Cited source to make original reporting easier to spot.
- The rollout is designed to address publisher concerns about lost referral traffic and Google says it may in future treat Preferred Sources as a ranking signal across AI features, though that change remains under study.