Google Preferred Sources: What It Is and How to Add the Button to Your Site

Google quietly gave publishers a button, and almost nobody in Australia is using it

In August 2026, Google released official embed code for something called a preferred source button. Two lines of code. Any site can add it.

When one of your readers taps it, they are telling Google that they trust you. From that point on, Google favours your site in that person's Top Stories, AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover, and marks your result with a "preferred" badge.

It is documented in Google's own Search Central guidance. There is nothing grey about it.

Here is what it does, how to check whether your site qualifies, and two problems we hit rolling it out across client sites that nobody else seems to have written up.

What it actually does

Preferred sources is a personalisation layer. It sits alongside the ranking algorithm rather than replacing it.

That distinction matters, so it is worth being blunt about it. Adding the button does not make Google rank you higher. It does not force you into AI Overviews. If your page is not relevant to what someone asked, a preferred source setting will not rescue it.

What it does do is tilt the results toward you for the specific people who chose you. Their choice is tied to their Google account, so it follows them across phone, laptop and tablet. For a business that wants to be the one a customer comes back to, that is a real edge.

Google opened the feature globally, in all supported languages, on 30 April 2026. Australian and Hebrew language sites are both covered.

First, check whether your site is eligible

Go to google.com/preferences/source, sign in, and type your domain into the search box.

If Google carries your site as a source, it comes up and you can tick it. Some sites appear with their business name, others show only the bare domain. Both are fine.

Two things to know:

Only domains and subdomains qualify. If your content lives at example.com you are fine. If it lives at somebodyelse.com/yourbusiness you are not, because the tool works at domain level.

Google drops sites that go quiet. Its own note on the page says sources that are not updated regularly may be unavailable. Publishing consistently is what keeps you in the list, which is the same thing that helps everywhere else.

There is no application form, no submission endpoint, no API. You cannot request eligibility. Google decides based on what it indexes and how often you publish. If your site is new, it is very likely a matter of time rather than something you can fix.

The link that looks like it works, and does not

You will see advice telling you to send people to a prefilled link like this:

https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=yourdomain.com

We tested it. It does not do what people think.

The link opens the tool with your domain typed into the search box, and then shows nothing. No result, no checkbox, just an empty state telling the visitor to add their preferred sources. They have to click into the field and press a key before your site appears.

If you put that link in a newsletter, most people will land on it, see nothing, and leave. Use the button instead.

How to add the button

Google's script goes in your :

<script async src="https://news.google.com/swg/js/v1/publisher.js"></script>

Then drop this wherever you want the button to appear:

<div google-add-preferred-source-btn></div>

Add data-theme="dark" for a dark button, or data-lang="he" to pin the language. Google matches the primary language code only, so a Hebrew site sends he, not he-IL.

Sensible places to put it: at the end of every article, in your footer, or in your sidebar next to your social links. Google updated the button in August 2026 so that after someone taps Add, they land back on the page they were reading rather than being dumped on a Google settings screen.

The problem that cost us an afternoon

Here is the part we have not seen documented anywhere.

On a client site running a caching and JavaScript optimisation plugin, we shipped the button and the page looked fine in the code, but nothing rendered. The

<script>
(function(){
  var s = document.createElement("script");
  s.async = true;
  s.src = "https://news.google.com/swg/js/v1/publisher.js";
  document.head.appendChild(s);
})();
</script>