Make us a Preferred Source on Google — and why it now matters

On May 27, 2026, Google did something quietly significant: it brought Preferred Sources into AI Overviews and AI Mode — not just the news carousels where the feature started. If you use Google, you can now tell it which publications you trust, and your picks get favored — with a visible "Preferred" label — inside the AI answers themselves.

This is a real lever, and almost nobody is using it yet. Here's the plain version.

What it actually does

When you mark a site as a preferred source, Google is more likely to surface that site's content for you — in Top Stories, and now inside AI Overviews and AI Mode — and it shows a Preferred label next to it. Google has said users are roughly twice as likely to click a preferred source. Hundreds of thousands of people have already picked their sources.

It's per-person: your preferences shape your results, not everyone's. So it's not a ranking trick — it's you telling Google whose work you want to see.

Why this matters when you're choosing who to trust

Most of the marketing advice in AI answers is generic, rephrased, and written by people who've never run the campaigns they describe. We publish the opposite: the actual restricted-vertical playbook we run, the ad-policy matrix we re-verify every quarter, and real operating numbers from the businesses we run and serve.

If that's the kind of source you'd rather see when you ask Google a marketing question — instead of another agency blog optimized to rank — Preferred Sources is how you say so.

How to set it (about two minutes)

1. Open Google's source settings with our site pre-filled: google.com/preferences/source?q=mediapromotions.net
2. Confirm Media Promotions as a preferred source.
3. That's it. You'll start seeing our guides favored, with a Preferred label, in your Search and AI results.

You can add as many sources as you want, and change them anytime. It costs nothing and it's not an account or a signup — it's a setting on your own Google.

Our ask

If our work has been useful — the pillar guides, the tools, the honest compliance reporting — make us a preferred source. It's the single most direct way to keep the useful version of this category in front of you as AI search takes over the answers.

Media Promotions is a Tampa, FL operator-led growth agency. We publish what we actually run. Start a project →