Overview
- Google announced the personalization package on Thursday, August 20, 2026, and published code so publishers can embed a new interactive Preferred Sources button on their sites.
- The Preferred Sources button lets readers add a site to their Google preferences without leaving the publisher’s page and makes marked sites more visible in Top Stories, AI Overviews, and AI Mode.
- Discover will gain a natural-language, chatbot-style tuning flow that lets users type requests, answer follow-up prompts, and refresh their feed in real time; Google says the interface will roll out in the coming days.
- Google News on Android now offers customizable daily audio briefings where users pick topics and hear summaries with clear source attribution and links to full articles.
- Google frames the features as a shift from implicit signals to explicit user control that could help publishers recover traffic lost to AI-driven summaries, and the company reports more than 600,000 unique Preferred Source selections to date.