Google makes the Preferred Sources button seamless

Before: a reader tapped the «Preferred Sources» star on a publisher's site and landed inside Google, on a separate settings screen. After: the click adds the source to their favourites and sends the reader straight back to the exact spot they were reading. Google shipped the change on 20 August 2026.

Preferred Sources lets people star their favourite publications so Google shows more of their material in Top Stories. Google hands publishers a ready-made embed code in its developer documentation: drop the button into your article template and you get a direct «subscriber» inside search results.

The numbers Google published alongside the update explain why this is not a cosmetic tweak:

• more than 600,000 unique sources have already been selected by users;
• back in May 2026 the count sat at roughly 200,000 — three times fewer;
• readers with preferred sources are twice as likely to click on those publishers' stories.

The road here was long: beta in June 2025, launch in the US and India in August 2025, global rollout in December 2025, and support for every language in May 2026. The update was first unpacked in detail by Search Engine Land.

Until now the button quietly worked against the publisher hosting it: it removed the reader from the article at the moment of peak engagement. That barrier is gone, so the maths finally works for sites that hesitated. For media outlets and content projects living on news traffic, this is the cheapest way to lock in a slice of Top Stories while AI blocks eat clicks everywhere else. The plan is simple: grab the embed from the documentation, place it in your article template — after the lead and at the end of the text — then watch Top Stories impressions and returning visits in Search Console. A month is enough to tell whether the star drives real traffic or just decorates the page.