Overview
- On Friday, August 21, 2026 Google publicly announced a package of personalization tools for Search, Discover and Google News that give users more direct control over what they see.
- Publishers can embed a new interactive “Preferred sources” button whose clicks add a site to a user’s preferred list and can make that publisher’s content more likely to appear in Top stories, AI overviews and AI mode while leaving standard search result order governed by relevance and recency.
- Discover will receive a free-text, natural-language control accessed from a card’s three-dot menu so users can tell Google in their own words which topics or links to show more or less of, with the feed applying and remembering preferences immediately during a U.S. rollout in the coming days.
- Google News Audio Briefing on Android is being expanded from a U.S. AI pilot that began in late 2025 to let users select and refine daily audio-summary topics such as headlines, business, sport and tech.
- Publishers can find implementation code in Google Search Central, some outlets like CHIP have already added the button, Google says over 600,000 sources have been chosen so far, and the features require a signed‑in Google account and regional availability which may affect how traffic flows to sites.