If you’ve searched Google recently, you may have noticed a small star icon next to certain results or a “prefer this source” option in your search settings. That’s Preferred Sources — a feature Google rolled out in 2026 that puts you in control of which websites get priority when you search.
What Is a Google Preferred Source?
A Google Preferred Source is a website that a Google user has manually chosen to see more often in Top Stories, AI Overviews, and AI Mode — the AI-generated answers that now appear above traditional search results for many queries. Once you add a site as a preferred source, Google prioritizes its fresh, relevant content and marks it with a small “preferred” badge so you know why it’s showing up. The setting lives in your own Google account, applies across desktop and mobile, and can be changed or removed at any time. It doesn’t hide other websites from your results — it just tells Google which sources you already trust, so it leans toward showing you more of them.
Why This Matters for a Local Business Like CelereTech
Search results — and increasingly, AI-generated answers — tend to favor large, national brands with enormous marketing budgets, even when a local provider is the better fit for a Chicagoland business. Preferred Sources gives readers a direct way to push back on that: it’s a signal from an actual person, not an algorithm guessing at authority. Google has reported that people are about twice as likely to click through to a site after marking it preferred, and the badge itself tells other searchers that real people vouch for the source.
If CelereTech has helped your business, or if you’d simply like to see more of our guides and coverage of Chicagoland IT, cybersecurity, and compliance topics show up when you search, adding us as a preferred source takes about ten seconds and doesn’t cost anything or change any other account setting.
Add CelereTech as Your Preferred Source
If the button above doesn’t load, you can also add us directly through Google’s source preferences tool.