Can a Small Blog Become Google's Preferred Source?

Google has spent two years teaching people to read the answer and skip the link. Now it is asking those same people to tell it which websites they trust.

I'm a consultant, not a search engineer. I started this blog to learn about AI by doing, and one of the first things I learned is how fast the ground moves. Something I wrote about in January can be out of date by the summer. Keeping up is hard when you have a day job, and I don't think I'm the only one who feels a bit behind most of the time.

So I've started writing short notes like this one when something changes that matters to me. Partly to keep myself informed, partly so you don't have to dig through ten vendor blogs to find out what actually happened. This one is about a small change in Google with an interesting twist for people like me who run a small site.

Quick Answer: Google's Preferred Sources lets you star the sites you like. Since May 2026 those sites get a "Preferred" badge in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and since October Google says it gives them priority in the links shown next to AI answers. Google says people are about twice as likely to click a preferred source. Nobody has shown yet what that means for a small independent site.

01.What Google Changed

Preferred Sources started as a setting for Top Stories: you tell Google which news sites you want to see more of. In late May 2026 Google brought it into AI Overviews and AI Mode, so links from your chosen sites show up with a "Preferred" badge inside the AI answer.

Then, in mid-October, AFP reported a bigger change. Google is moving links higher and showing them more often in AI Mode, rolling out the link carousel under AI Overviews worldwide, and giving preferred sources priority in which links appear. The same report cited Chartbeat figures showing news publishers lost about 40% of their Google traffic between July 2025 and July 2026. That is the pressure behind all of this.

02.The Numbers, and What They Don't Say

Two numbers keep coming up in the coverage.

• About twice the clicks. Google says people are roughly twice as likely to click a source they marked as preferred. Google has not published how it measured this, and there is an obvious catch: people who star a site were already fans of it. The badge may not be doing much of the work.
• More than 600,000 sources. Industry coverage reports that people have picked over 600,000 different sources, up from about 345,000 in May. I couldn't find this number from Google itself, so I treat it as a rough signal.

What is missing is any data from a small site. Every case study I found is about news publishers with large, loyal audiences.

03.Why I Care About This

I have written about the shift from SEO to GEO, about why trust and real experience matter more in AI search, and about tools to check how visible you are to AI. The common thread was that you can't directly control whether an AI cites you. You can only make yourself easier to trust.

Preferred Sources is the first lever I've seen where the reader decides. That is interesting for a blog like mine. I will never beat a large publisher on backlinks or domain authority, but a few hundred readers who actually like what I write could be a real signal.

It could also go the other way. If most people star the BBC, the Financial Times and their local paper, the feature mostly makes big brands bigger. A small blog becomes even easier to overlook.

04.My Plan: Test It on This Site

Instead of copying a publisher guide, I want to try it here and report back.

1. Ask readers who find this blog useful to add paulspov.com as a preferred source in their Google search settings.
2. Watch Search Console and my analytics for a few weeks: impressions, clicks and any traffic from AI Overviews or AI Mode.
3. Write up what happened, including if the answer is "nothing measurable".

I expect the numbers to be small and noisy. A small site doesn't produce clean data. But a small, honest result is still more useful than another guide that assumes you already have a million readers.

It will probably change again before I have results. That seems to be how AI search works now, and it's the reason I keep writing these notes. If you read this blog and want to help, adding it as a preferred source in your Google settings is the easiest way. I'll share what I find here.

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Sources

• Google, "New ways to find your favorite sources and original content in AI Search", The Keyword (Google blog), May 2026. blog.google
• AFP, "Google boosts news and link visibility in AI mode", via Eyewitness News, 16 October 2026. ewn.co.za
• TechCrunch, "Google gives publishers a new way to fight AI-driven traffic losses", 20 August 2026. techcrunch.com
• PPC Land, coverage of Preferred Sources adoption and the October changes, 2026. ppc.land