Google Expands Preferred Sources Globally as New AI News Deals Quietly Change Search

Google Expands Preferred Sources & Publisher AI Partnerships

Preferred Sources in Google Search lets people prioritize specific news outlets in the Top Stories section. Google is now rolling the feature out to English-language users worldwide and says it plans to extend Preferred Sources to all supported languages early next year.

Google shared early usage data from the initial launch. According to the company, people selected nearly 90,000 unique sources, ranging from local blogs to international publications. Users who chose preferred sources clicked those outlets about twice as often on average.

Google will also add a subscription highlighting feature that surfaces links from a user's paid news subscriptions. Search results will prioritize subscribed publications and display them in a dedicated carousel. The feature will appear first in the Gemini app in the coming weeks, then later in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

In AI Mode, Google plans to increase the number of inline links and refresh their visual design. Each embedded link will include a brief note explaining why the source might be useful for the current query. Google reports its Web Guide experiment now loads twice as fast and appears on more searches for enrolled users.

Key Details on Publisher AI Pilot

Google announced a commercial AI partnership pilot with several major news organizations across multiple regions. Named partners include Der Spiegel, El País, Folha de S. Paulo, Infobae, Kompas, and The Guardian. The Times of India, The Washington Examiner, and The Washington Post are also participating.

Within Google News, the pilot will test AI-generated overviews on participating publishers' pages. These overviews will summarize article topics while including attribution and links back to the full stories. Google will also experiment with audio briefings that present news from these outlets in spoken form.

Separate content partnerships will supply real-time updates for the Gemini app. Partners named for this input include Estadão, Antara, Yonhap, and The Associated Press. Google states that all these collaborations include clear source attribution within Gemini experiences.

The company also highlighted the broader scale of its news relationships, reporting partnerships with more than 3,000 publications, platforms, and content providers across over 50 countries worldwide.

Background Context and Sources

Preferred Sources first launched in limited markets as a way for users to customize which outlets appear in Google Search Top Stories. The feature allows people to pick specific publishers, whose coverage then appears more prominently in news-related search modules. The new global expansion extends this capability to English-language users in more countries.

The subscription highlighting feature will mark and prioritize results from outlets where the user holds a paid news subscription. Google says this labeling will eventually apply across Search, the Gemini app, AI Overviews, and AI Mode once the rollout is complete.

Google detailed the Preferred Sources expansion, subscription highlighting, and publisher pilots in a post on its official Google Products blog about expanding its Preferred Sources feature, new tools, and partnerships for the web ecosystem.