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Google Preferred Sources: What They Are and How to Get Your Site Listed
Google quietly shipped something in 2025 that most South African business owners still haven’t heard of: readers can now choose which websites they want to see more of.
It’s called preferred sources. A person searches for something, and if they’ve marked your site as a preferred source, your content gets a better shot at appearing — with a small “preferred” badge next to it.
Here’s what it actually means for your business, whether you qualify, and how to set it up.
What is a Google preferred source?
Think of it as a follow button for Google Search.
Google users can open a settings tool, search for a website by name, and tick a box. From that point on, when they search for topics that site covers, Google is more likely to show them that site’s content.
It shows up in two places:
Top Stories. The news carousel that appears at the top of search results for current topics. Sites a user has preferred are more likely to appear there, marked with a “preferred” label.
AI Mode and AI Overviews. This is the interesting one. When Google’s AI generates an answer, content from a user’s preferred sources can be highlighted with the same badge.
That second one is why this matters more than it first appears. AI-generated answers are increasingly where people land, and being a flagged source inside one of those answers is a very different position from being link number seven on page one.
Who qualifies?
Two rules, and the first one is strict:
1. It has to be a whole domain or subdomain. yourbusiness.co.za works. blog.yourbusiness.co.za works. yourbusiness.co.za/blog does not. Google treats the site as the unit, not a section of it.
2. Your site has to already appear in Google’s source preferences tool. This is not something you apply for. Google decides which sites are listed, based on whether you publish content regularly and whether that content is the kind people would want to follow.
How to check in 30 seconds
Go to google.com/preferences/source and type your domain into the search box.
If your site comes up with a tick box next to it, you’re eligible. If nothing appears, you’re not — yet.
What to do if you’re not listed
There’s no form to fill in and no support queue to join. The honest answer is that Google lists sites that publish consistently and cover a recognisable subject area.
If you’re a plumber in Gqeberha with a five-page brochure site and no blog, you won’t be listed, and no amount of technical work will change that. What changes it is publishing useful content on a regular schedule until Google recognises your site as a publication rather than a business card.
That’s a six-to-twelve month project, not a weekend one. But it’s the same work that earns you rankings, AI citations and organic leads, so it’s not wasted effort in any case.
How to add the button to your website
If you are listed, you can put a button on your site that lets readers add you in one click. Google gives you three options.
Option 1: The standard button (recommended)
Two pieces of code. First, this goes in your site’s <head>:
<script async src=”https://news.google.com/swg/js/v1/publisher.js”></script>
Then this goes wherever you want the button to appear:
<div google-add-preferred-source-btn></div>
That’s it. Google renders a properly styled button that automatically translates itself into the visitor’s language. You can set data-theme="dark" if your site is dark-themed.
Swap in your own domain. It sends people to the preferences tool with your site already searched for. Less slick than the button, but it works, and it works anywhere — including in Facebook posts, WhatsApp broadcasts and email newsletters.
Option 3: A custom button
Google publishes official badge graphics you can download and use as a clickable image, or you can design your own and wire it to the link above.
The three things that will trip you up
We set this up on our own site, and each of these cost us time. Learn from them.
Your cookie consent settings will silently break it. If your site has a cookie banner and you file the Google script under a consent category, the script will not load until the visitor accepts. Most visitors ignore cookie banners. The result is an invisible button and no error message anywhere. Set the script to load unconditionally — it doesn’t set tracking cookies on page load, and the user only interacts with Google when they actively click.
WordPress will strip the button code. The google-add-preferred-source-btn attribute isn’t standard HTML, so WordPress’s built-in content filter deletes it from ordinary text blocks. Use a dedicated code block or an HTML widget instead. If you view your page source and see an empty <div></div>, this is what happened.
Caching will make you think it failed. After adding the code, clear your theme cache, your caching plugin, and your CDN. Then check in a private browsing window.
Test the final result in incognito mode without touching the cookie banner. If the button renders there, it renders for everyone.
Getting people to actually use it
A button nobody clicks is decoration. Two things move the needle:
Ask directly. A short post explaining what it does and why it helps them — “get our content in your search results” — converts far better than a button sitting silently in a sidebar.
Put the link where your audience already is. The on-site button only reaches people already visiting you. The plain link works in a Facebook post, an email footer, a Google Business Profile update or a WhatsApp message. That’s where the volume is.
Is it worth doing?
Let’s be straight about scale.
If you’re a South African small business with a few hundred blog readers a month, preferred sources is not going to transform your traffic. Top Stories is a news-first feature, and you’re not a news publisher.
But it costs about fifteen minutes to set up, it never needs maintaining, and the AI Overviews angle is the part that quietly compounds. Search is shifting from ten blue links to generated answers with a handful of cited sources. Anything that improves your odds of being one of those cited sources is worth fifteen minutes.
It also does something less measurable: it signals that you’re a publication worth following, not just a company with a website. For a small business competing against bigger names, that positioning is worth having.
The bottom line
Check google.com/preferences/source for your domain. If you’re there, add the button — it’s a quick win. If you’re not, that’s useful information too: it means Google doesn’t yet see your site as something people would want to follow, and consistent publishing is the only thing that changes that.
Either way, you’ve learned something concrete about how Google sees your business today.
