Malaysian websites have spent the past year watching Google send them fewer readers, as AI answers settle more questions right on the results page. On 20 August, Google offered a small lever back: a Preferred Sources button that a site can place on its own pages, letting readers tell Google to show that site more often.
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How the Preferred Sources button works
The button, announced by Google search ecosystem lead Mrinalini Loew and reported by TechCrunch, appears on an article as an "Add to Preferred Sources" tap. A reader taps it, confirms once on a short Google screen, and lands back on the same article. From then on, Google says it leans toward that site across Search, Discover and Google News. Per TechCrunch, more than 600,000 sites have already been picked this way, up from 200,000 when the feature reached AI Mode and AI Overviews in May, and readers are about twice as likely to click through to a source they have marked as preferred.
Why this matters for Malaysian sites
The backdrop is a real squeeze. AI Overviews now answer plenty of searches without a single click, and one Malaysian analysis by business consultancy xWork put the fall in click-throughs at 58 percent when an AI Overview sits at the top of the page. For a local publisher, an online store, an SME running a blog on the side or a creator with a personal site, that is readers, ad views and sales quietly leaking away while the rankings themselves look unchanged.
The button does not undo that. What it does is hand loyal readers a way to vote for the sites they already trust. That is worth most to smaller Malaysian sites, the ones that lose blind rankings to bigger brands but have an audience that would choose them on purpose. The catch is plain: it only works if readers use it, so a site has to add the button and actually ask them to.
The bigger shift for creators
The move fits a wider pattern of platforms tightening the path to an audience. YouTube just doubled the bar new creators must clear before earning ad money, and Malaysians are spreading their attention across apps rather than the open web: a recent survey found most treat TikTok as a place to learn and connect, not just to scroll. Each time a gatekeeper changes the rules, owning a direct relationship with readers, on your own site, in a newsletter or on a channel you control, matters more.
Google's button is a small thing, embed code lifted from its Search Central pages. But it is one of the few levers publishers have been handed rather than had taken away, and for a Malaysian site feeling the AI-search squeeze it costs nothing to add. It simply asks readers to do on purpose what the loyal ones already want to.
Images courtesy of Glenn Carstens-Peters and Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash.
