Google is expanding Preferred Sources — a feature that lets users select their favorite sites to be prioritized — to AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Content from Preferred Sources is labeled in AI results to ensure users can easily identify it, similar to how it already works in Top Stories.
Google is also bringing Preferred Sources to carousels that are rolling out for developing topics. When a query is about an evolving or breaking subject, searchers may see a prominent carousel of timely article links.
Searchers may also see a carousel when looking for firsthand perspectives, and those carousels pull links from forums, online discussions, and social media.
What Preferred Sources means for brands’ AI visibility
The ability to be added as a Preferred Source presents the potential for greater visibility among your target audience.
Google says people are “twice as likely to click through to a Preferred Source.” For publishers, that’s the real opportunity. That kind of personalized visibility boost could meaningfully change traffic patterns, especially as AI experiences handle more queries.
Glenn Gabe, AI Search Consultant, noted in an X post that the prominence of Preferred Sources within AI experiences could very well drive more clicks to websites:
Being added as a Preferred Source is also a way to improve your AI visibility without directly optimizing your content or your online presence. You become more visible in AI Overviews, AI Mode, Top Stories, and the new carousels simply because users have chosen to prioritize your content.
To help users find your site as a preferred source, Google recommends:
- Adding the deeplink — a direct URL that takes users straight to the Preferred sources page with your site pre-filled — to ensure they can add you in one click. For example: https://google.com/preferences/source?q=semrush.com
- Adding a button to your site next to your other social CTAs encouraging visitors to add you as a Preferred Source
How to measure your AI visibility across platforms
Preferred Sources can affect your visibility inside Google’s ecosystem, but understanding the full picture of how your brand is cited in multiple AI systems requires cross-platform tracking.
Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit tracks mentions, citations, cited URLs, and share of voice across AI platforms in a single dashboard. So you can compare your Google AI performance against your visibility elsewhere.
Site Audit, part of the SEO Toolkit, is useful for making sure you aren’t inadvertently blocking AI crawlers — an issue that limits visibility from the start. A Semrush One subscription gives you access to both the AI Visibility Toolkit and the SEO Toolkit.
And Semrush Enterprise AIO provides AI visibility monitoring across platforms at the scale enterprise teams need.
