How to force Google AI Overviews to prioritize your favorite news sources

Editor's take

Google has introduced a "Preferred Sources" feature allowing users to explicitly elevate specific websites within its AI Overviews and AI Mode search results.

This development directly addresses a growing concern: the potential for AI-generated summaries to sideline established news organizations, impacting their traffic and revenue. By giving users agency, Google aims to mitigate criticism that its AI might favor less reputable or aggregated content over original reporting, while simultaneously reinforcing its own platform's utility for content discovery.

Future iterations will likely reveal the true impact of this feature. The key question is whether user preferences will significantly alter the distribution of traffic away from sites that don't make it onto those curated lists, and if this preference mechanism will be granular enough to influence the specific AI Overviews generated for complex queries.