Google is about to let you tell your Discover feed what you want in plain English. In an announcement covering Search, Discover and Google News, the company said that “in the coming days in the Google app, you’ll be able to tap any three-dot menu in your feed to tell Google the exact topics or links you want to see more (or less) of, in your words.” Alongside it comes a Preferred Sources button that publishers can plant on their own websites, and topic-picking for Google News audio briefings on Android.
Google Discover personalization in your own words
The Discover change is the one most Android users will notice, because Discover is the feed sitting one swipe left of the home screen on a lot of phones. Instead of the blunt “not interested” and “hide this source” options that exist today, the three-dot menu on a card will accept typed instructions. Google’s examples are things like kitchen renovation ideas but eco-friendly only, or weekend road trip videos but nothing about camping. The company says the feed “will adjust on the fly, and remember your requests,” and that Google can ask follow-up questions to narrow things further.
Take the promise seriously and it is genuinely useful — Discover’s failure mode has always been that it decides what you like by watching what you tap, which is how one accidental click on a celebrity story turns into a fortnight of them. Being able to say what you want directly is a better mechanism than being profiled by your worst clicks.
Take it seriously and the cost is visible too. Every one of those typed instructions is a stated interest, in your own words, attached to your Google account and retained — Google’s own framing is that the feed will “remember your requests.” That is a richer and more explicit profile of what you care about than inference from taps has ever produced, sitting in the same account that runs your ad personalisation. Nothing in the announcement says how long those instructions are kept, whether they can be reviewed or deleted individually, or whether they feed anything beyond Discover. Those are the questions worth asking of a feature marketed purely as control.
The Preferred Sources button is aimed at publishers first
The second piece is framed as reader choice but is built for the other side of the transaction. “We’re releasing a new interactive ‘Preferred Sources’ button that publishers can embed on their pages,” Google says. Click it on a website and that site is added as a Preferred Source on your Google account, and you are dropped back where you were on the page. Preferred Sources then surface more prominently in Top Stories, in AI Overviews and in AI Mode. Google says people have selected more than 600,000 unique sources so far, and points publishers to code in its Search Central documentation.
Read that structurally. Preferred Sources already existed as a setting you go into Search to configure; what is new is a one-tap widget that publishers put in front of you at the moment you are reading their article. It is an acquisition mechanic, and the party with the incentive to deploy it aggressively is the publisher, not you. That does not make it bad — a reader who genuinely wants a particular outlet ranked higher now has a much easier route to it — but a button that appears where a site wants it, phrased how a site wants it, is not the same thing as a preference you sought out.
Audio briefings you can steer
The third change is smaller. Daily audio briefings in the Google News app on Android can now be curated by picking specific topics, with what Google describes as clear source attribution and links out to full articles. Categories include Headlines, Business, Entertainment and lifestyle, Sports, and Science and technology, with sub-categories underneath — Entertainment breaks down into Arts and Design, Movies, Music, Theater and TV. Google also says publishers in its news AI pilot programme allow deeper dives on major stories inside the briefing.
“These new personalization features make your Google experience uniquely yours,” wrote Mrinalini Loew, General Manager of Google Search Ecosystem, in the announcement. The Discover controls are the ones with a stated timeline, arriving in the Google app in the coming days; the Preferred Sources button is live for publishers now.
Source: 9to5Google, for the Google News category breakdown
