Searching for news online isn’t always a great experience these days. Between algorithm updates that prioritize SEO-heavy ads and the growth of AI-generated search summaries, studies show that search engines are often inundated with low-quality results.
Last year, digital intelligence platform Similarweb estimated that global search traffic dropped 15 percent due to AI. That means readers are often not accessing original sources, and less traffic is going toward publishers who rely on referral traffic as a revenue source (aka, BetaKit and much of digital media).
That’s likely in part why Google has now rolled out a feature in Canada intended to help users see more of the content they’re looking for. Preferred Sources, which launched in Canada in December, lets Google Search users customize their “top stories” section to see more news from their preferred media outlets (which hopefully includes BetaKit).
According to Google, users in the US have selected more than 90,000 unique sources, from local blogs to global newsrooms, as their preferred media outlets since the feature first launched early last year. The feature is now available for all English-language users, and will roll out to all supported languages this year.
If you want to see BetaKit as one of your preferred sources and ensure you don’t miss out on any of our in-depth and breaking reporting, like our analysis of the top tech stories of last year, you can click here and check the box to the right of our publication’s name.
You can also search for your other favourite news sources—there’s plenty of other great, independent Canadian media worth reading—and add those links, too.
A Google spokesperson said that Preferred Sources is just one of the ways Google is working to improve how it connects search users with publishers, including by increasing the number of links included in AI-generated summaries, and prioritizing links to news sites users are subscribed to.
And, in the meantime, this offers at least one way you can take back control of your algorithm.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Shutterspeed.