New ways to find your favorite sources and original content in AI Search
Google brought Preferred Sources into AI Overviews and AI Mode on May 27, surfacing labeled links from preferred publishers in AI responses with a new Highly Cited badge.
Preferred Sources now injects publisher-level signals directly into AI Mode responses — the surface where agentic shopping queries increasingly land. Users who select preferred sources are twice as likely to click through to those outlets; 345,000 unique sources have been selected since launch. The Highly Cited badge identifies original reporting that other articles reference, giving AI Search a structural authority signal distinct from PageRank-style link count. For publishers and merchants optimizing for AEO (answer engine optimization), Google has added two new discovery controls: explicit user source preferences and editorial citation strength. The Universal Cart launch at I/O 2026 (2026-w21) established the transaction layer across Search, Maps, and Shopping; Preferred Sources now adds a discovery filter that governs which merchant and publisher content reaches the AI responses feeding into that transaction layer.