Google has offered publishers a new button. From Thursday, any site can embed a „Preferred Sources” tag in its articles with which a reader says, in one click, that they want to see that source more often in search, in Discover and in Google News. The offer arrives at the moment when the same company, with its AI-generated answers, is taking traffic away from those very publishers.

The option is not entirely new. Google released it in May in its AI products, in AI Mode and AI Overviews, and it previously existed in the top stories section. Up to that point, the company says, users across the web selected over 345,000 different sources. What is new is that until now the reader had to go to Google's own settings page and look the publisher up by name. Now the publisher can put the button on their own site.

What that is worth

By Google's own measurements, a reader is twice as likely to click on a source they marked as preferred themselves. The figure is real and it is not small. But note whose it is and what it measures: this is the company with one hand on the tap and the other on the valve, telling you its estimate of how much the gift it is handing out is worth.

Two smaller things arrive alongside the button. In the Google app, readers will soon be able to tune their Discover feed in plain words: tap the three-dot menu and say which topics they want more of and which less. Android users will be able to adjust the daily audio briefings in the Google News app in a similar way.

Google is not the only one offering people levers over the algorithm. In recent months a series of large social networks released similar controls, with the same message: if what you are shown bothers you, here is a button. That the choice of topics still takes place inside a system somebody else built is rarely mentioned.

For a publisher the calculation is simple enough anyway. A mechanism that returns some readers is better than nothing, and the button costs one line of code. It is just worth naming what is actually happening: the search engine that was for years the main door to the internet is now offering sites the chance to beg for a visit at that same door, after it started keeping people to itself.