Google tries new approach to news: Preferred sources and AI-driven partnerships
The Silicon Valley giant is rolling out search features and launching pilot partnerships with news publishers.
Google is reworking how Search and Gemini surface news. The company is adding new features and launching a pilot program that ties AI outputs more directly to publishers and user-selected sources.
The biggest change is Preferred Sources, a tool that lets people pick which outlets they want to see highlighted. It rolls out globally in the coming days for English-language users and will expand to all supported languages early next year.
Google is also pulling users’ existing news subscriptions into its AI surfaces. Links from those subscriptions will start appearing in the Gemini app within weeks. AI Overviews and AI Mode will follow, and Google says both will show more inline links, clearer context around those links, and improvements to Web Guide, which now loads twice as fast and triggers on more searches for people in the experiment.
The company says it has already worked with more than 3,000 publications and platforms in over 50 countries. The new pilot commercial partnership program adds a curated set of major publishers, including Der Spiegel, El País, Folha de S. Paulo, Infobae, Kompas, The Guardian, The Times of India, The Washington Examiner, and The Washington Post. Google is also partnering with Estadão, Antara, Yonhap, and the Associated Press to supply real-time data for the Gemini app.
As part of the pilot, Google is testing AI-generated article overviews on participating publishers’ Google News pages. It is also experimenting with audio briefings that include clear attribution and direct links to source articles.
What it means
Google is trying to rebuild trust with news organisations while defending its AI products against complaints that AI summaries weaken the open web. Preferred Sources gives users control over what they see. The publisher partnerships give Google a defensive answer to claims that AI erodes traffic. And the integrations with Gemini signal that Google wants AI-first search to carry more links, not fewer.
The strategy also hints at a broader shift: Google is using partnerships and attribution features to show regulators and publishers that AI-assisted search can support the news ecosystem rather than drain it. Whether the model scales beyond a pilot will depend on publisher economics — and how much control users actually feel they gain from the new tools.The Recap
