Google's Preferred Source Button Hides Follower Counts

Google Opened Up a Preferred Source Button, But It Won’t Tell You Who Clicked It

On the 20th, Google handed publishers a new button. Add a few lines of code to your site, and readers get an option that says “Add this outlet as a preferred source.” Click it, and that outlet’s articles are supposed to show up more often in Google Search and AI answers.

For outlets whose traffic has been gutted by AI summaries, this sounds like good news. Several outlets have indeed reported it as “a lifeline Google threw to publishers.” I’ve covered this ground before, in an earlier issue about how Google’s search overhaul has been draining traffic from all kinds of websites, small and mid-sized media especially.

A Single Search Bar Is Rewriting the Food Chain · Issue 106 · INLEVEL9The apex predator of the ecosystem is redesigning its own ecosysteminlevel9.com

But this button behaves less like a search feature and more like a “follow” button on social media. Once a reader designates a particular outlet, that outlet’s stories start appearing more often for them. The catch is that publishers have no way of checking how many readers have set them as a preferred source. What’s more, this setup favors outlets that already have a loyal readership willing to click the button—which means it does the least for the small outlets that lost the most traffic in the first place.

What Google Rolled Out on August 20

Google unveiled three things that day.

First, the Preferred Sources embed button. Readers could already go into Google’s settings page and designate specific publishers themselves. What’s new is that publishers can now embed this button directly on their own site—when a reader clicks it, registration completes and they land right back on the page they were reading. No exit required: that’s the key improvement.

Second, the Discover¹ feed in the Google app can now be adjusted using natural language. Tap the three-dot menu on the feed and type something like “I want to see less of this topic,” and it’s reflected in real time.

Third, on Android, the Google News audio briefing lets you directly pick and configure topics.

All three features point in the same direction: letting readers actively choose what they see across Search, Discover, and audio briefings.

Google’s documentation also spells out what changes once you’re designated a preferred source. You show up more often in the Top Stories² section, and you get a “preferred” badge in AI Overviews and AI Mode³. One thing worth flagging here: Google does not say your ranking improves in regular search results. The official language stops at “more likely to appear in Top Stories.” And since designation only works at the domain or subdomain level, publications running on a subpath like example.com/blog aren’t eligible to begin with. You may have noticed—this is exactly why our own newsletter’s domain structure is currently testing the following setup:

• INLEVEL9 Letter.com/issue/
• inlevel9.com/

Why pull out this button now, of all times

Google didn’t just wake up one day feeling generous. There are numbers behind this.

Pew Research Center dug into the actual browsing history of 900 U.S. adults — 68,879 Google searches, to be precise. When search results came with an AI summary attached, only 8% of users clicked through to a regular link. Without a summary, that number was 15%. It nearly halved. Clicks on source links embedded inside the AI summary itself made up just 1% of all visits. Worth keeping in mind, though: this is U.S. data from a single month, March 2025, and Google pushed back, arguing that “the sample queries aren’t representative of search as a whole.”

The traffic numbers are even starker. Analytics firm Chartbeat compared December 2024 to December 2025, and the drop in search-referred traffic split sharply by publisher size:

• Small publishers (1,000–10,000 daily pageviews): down 60%
• Mid-size publishers (10,000–100,000): down 47%
• Large publishers (100,000+): down 22%

Overall web traffic fell just 6% over the same period. So this isn’t the web shrinking overall — it looks much more like traffic being redistributed from small publishers to large ones. For reference, ChatGPT-referred traffic grew over 200%, but it’s still under 1% of total referrals. That’s nowhere near enough scale to explain where the small publishers’ lost traffic actually went.

One more thing. According to Chartbeat’s aggregated data across roughly 2,000 news and media sites worldwide, 68% of the traffic Google sends publishers comes from Discover, not Search. Search accounts for only 32%.

From a publisher’s standpoint, the majority of inbound traffic from Google is already coming through the Discover feed, not search results. And on Discover, readers never type a query — so instead of search terms, the algorithm needs some other signal to decide what to show, something like a reader’s interests or subscription relationships. This new preferred-sources button is exactly that: a device for collecting that signal directly from readers.

The 600,000-source number isn’t a headcount

Google’s announcement stated that “over 600,000 unique sources have been selected.” Back in May, the figure was 345,000 — a 74% jump in just about three months. That growth is real.

But there are two things to watch out for when reading this number.

First, 600,000 is not a count of people. “Unique sources” counts the types of sites selected. If one person picks ten sites, that counts as ten. If ten thousand people all pick the same site, that counts as one. So this metric tells us nothing about the scale of participants, nor the average follower count per outlet. Google has never disclosed user numbers.

Second, the claim that people “click twice as much” isn’t causation. Google says people click on their preferred sources roughly twice as often on average. But someone who designates a source as “preferred” already likes that outlet to begin with. You can’t call it the button’s effect when it’s simply people clicking on what they were always going to click on anyway. This is a textbook case of selection bias⁴ in statistics. Don’t read it as meaning the button doubles clicks.

This is where I come back to a question I keep asking my students in data class: “What did the person who made this number choose not to count?” What went uncounted here is user count — and any point of comparison.

Publishers can’t see how many readers picked their site

Say you add the button. Say 500 readers click it. So where does the publisher go to see that number, 500?

Nowhere. They can’t see it.

Digiday ran a piece last February interviewing people at the BBC, Vox, Wired, and The Guardian that tackled this problem head-on. Here’s what publishers said they couldn’t check: how many people came in through the preferred-source field, what share of total traffic that represents, and how many readers had designated their site as a preferred source in the first place. As one news outlet’s head of search put it:

“We’ve never seen meaningful traffic from preferred sources. A big reason is that Google doesn’t give us any way to track it.”

The timing of the question is worth noting, too. In August 2025, an SEO practitioner asked Google’s VP of Search Engineering, Rajan Patel, whether publishers could find out how many people had added their site as a preferred source. The answer was “we’re looking into it.” A year later, that data still doesn’t exist. Instead, we got another button.

To sum up the structure: publishers put the button on their own site and ask readers to click it, but only Google knows how many clicked, and how much traffic that actually generated.

The contrast with the social media era makes this clearer. Even Facebook pages showed you a follower count. Even as reach declined, you could at least run the diagnosis: “we have 100,000 followers but only 3% reach.” Preferred sources don’t even allow for that diagnosis. You can’t see how many readers designated your site, and you can’t see how much traffic came from them.

And consider who this design favors. It favors sites that already have loyal readers willing to click the button. Yet it was smaller outlets that lost 60% of their traffic. Large outlets with a thick base of loyal readers lost 22%; small outlets with few such readers lost 60%. The button is likely to do the least for the outlets that lost the most.

Oswarld’s Lens

To be honest, I’m one of the people caught up in this problem myself.

Looking at this newsletter’s recent numbers, web views run more than double email views. And over half of that web traffic comes from Google Discover. Just going by the raw figures, Discover delivers this newsletter to more people than my entire subscriber list does.

It sounds like good news, but every time I look at these numbers, I feel a little uneasy. I didn’t build that Discover traffic. Google’s algorithm picks this piece some days and skips it on others. In practice, I’ve written pieces I’d consider similar in quality that pull 10,000 views one day and 500 the next. There’s almost no variable I actually control.

This is a failure pattern I’ve seen play out repeatedly when working on GTM strategy. When a distribution channel owns the customer relationship, one policy change from that channel can shake the whole business. A brand whose distributor won’t share customer data, a seller who only sells inside a marketplace, a commerce business whose revenue depends on platform reach — they’re all built the same way. Everything’s fine when things are going well, and then the moment the policy shifts, it all collapses at once.

The “preferred sources” button follows the same structure. Except this time, publishers are also on the hook for asking readers to click the button. The publisher does the asking, but only Google sees how many people actually clicked.

So will I add this button? Yes. It costs almost nothing in money or time to paste in a few lines of code, if some readers click it, it helps with exposure in Top Stories or AI answer surfaces, and if no one clicks it, I lose nothing.

That said, I won’t call it a solution. Preferred Sources only nudges exposure odds slightly upward — it doesn’t hand over a reader’s contact information. Staying connected to readers long-term requires a subscriber list I own directly. That’s why, even though most of my traffic comes from Discover, I keep email delivery at the center of this newsletter. There’s no algorithm in the middle of email deciding what to show — when I hit send, it lands in the subscriber’s inbox. It’s an old-fashioned method, but right now, that’s exactly what makes it valuable.

Closing

Let me sum up in three points.

First, on August 20th Google unveiled a preferred-source embed button for publishers. It helps with visibility in popular news and AI answers, but nowhere does Google promise it’ll boost your ranking in regular search results.

Second, that “600,000 sources” figure counts types of sites, not people. And the claim that these sources get “2x more clicks” is measuring people who already liked that outlet — it shouldn’t be read as evidence of the button’s effect.

Third, and this is the biggest problem: publishers can’t see how many readers have designated their site as a preferred source. Publishers are the ones asking readers to click the button, but only Google holds the record of who clicked it, and how many.

Here’s one thing I’d suggest trying this week. If you run a site, check whether Google Search Console has a “Discover” performance report tab. This tab only appears for sites that have had Discover impressions within the past 16 months. If the tab is there, compare the share of traffic coming from Search versus Discover. If it’s not there, that means you’ve had no Discover impressions in the past 16 months — which tells you your Google-driven traffic depends entirely on Search. Either way, knowing that ratio beats building a content strategy blind.

💬 Have you ever seen the traffic sources for your own site or channel suddenly flip on you? Tell me in the comments which channel collapsed and which one filled the gap. I’ll gather these stories for a follow-up piece on channel dependency.

---

📨 If you know a colleague wrestling with site or newsletter traffic, pass this one along.

---

References & Further Reading

Primary sources

• Mrinalini Loew, “Personalize what you see on Google Search, News and Discover”, The Keyword (Google), August 20, 2026. ··· This is where today’s piece starts. Both the 600,000-source figure and all three features come straight from here.
• Google, “Guide to Preferred Sources in Google Search for Web Publishers”, Google Search Central. ··· Along with instructions for installing the button, this spells out exactly what Google is promising — and what it isn’t. Just reading the section on placement is worth the click.
• Sara Guaglione, “Without transparency, publishers can’t tell if Google’s Preferred Sources feature benefits them”, Digiday, February 26, 2026. ··· This is the core evidence for today’s argument. It spells out, in concrete terms, what major publishers can’t measure.
• Athena Chapekis, Anna Lieb, “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results”, Pew Research Center, July 22, 2025. ··· This is the original source for the 8% vs. 15% figure. I’d recommend checking the methodology section too — the sample is 68,879 searches from 900 U.S. adults, and it also covers Google’s rebuttal.
• Sara Fischer, “Small publishers hit hardest by search traffic declines”, Axios, March 17, 2026. ··· This is where the 60%/47%/22% decline-by-publisher-size data comes from. The contrast with overall web traffic — down just 6% — is especially telling.

Background

• Bron Maher, “Google Discover now makes up two-thirds of search traffic to news websites”, Press Gazette, August 7, 2025. ··· This is the Chartbeat tally showing that 68% of Google traffic now comes from Discover — hard evidence for the claim that the search engine has become a feed.
• Barry Schwartz, “Google Looking Into Adding Analytics For Preferred Sources”, Search Engine Roundtable, August 14, 2025. ··· This is the original source for Google’s “we’re looking into it” response. The fact that this is a year-old record is, in itself, telling for today’s story.

Related past issues worth reading

• A single search box is rewriting the food chain ··· Issue No. 106. It covered the bigger picture of Google reshaping search’s food chain. Today’s piece is the most recent scene in that same story.
• The URL Berners-Lee picked died four months later ··· This one covered the era in which a link stopped being a path and became evidence instead. It shares the same root as today’s “list” problem.

---

The author is Oswarld (Kwangseob Ahn). Current roles: Adjunct Professor at Sejong University, Strategy Consultant at INLEVEL9. Career, research, books, and recent work are kept current on the About page. Latest · July 2026: HEMA-2: A Consolidation-Aware Tri-Memory Architecture with Multi-Channel Scheduling for Lifelong Conversational AI.

📝 Glossary

Footnotes

1. Google Discover: A content feed that Google’s app or Android home screen surfaces on its own, without you typing a search query. Unlike search, where you go looking for something, this is a case of the algorithm pushing content to you first. ↩

2. Top Stories: A card-style cluster of the latest news that appears near the top of search results. It only shows up for time-sensitive queries, and it’s the spot where the Preferred Sources effect is strongest. ↩

3. AI Overviews / AI Mode: AI Overviews is the feature that generates a summary and attaches it to the top of search results; AI Mode turns the entire search experience into a conversation. Both share one thing in common: you can get your answer without ever clicking a link. ↩

4. Selection Bias: A distortion that occurs when the two groups being compared were made up of different kinds of people to begin with, leading you to misattribute the cause of a result. It’s the same error as looking at how gym members are healthier than average and concluding that “joining a gym makes you healthy.” ↩