You can’t mark a Gmail sender or an individual email as a Preferred Source in Google Search. The setting is for websites and other sources. To see more of a publication’s fresh, relevant content in Google Search, add its website under Search personalization → Source preferences. If you received its newsletter, the email may include a link that opens this setting with the publication preselected.
What Preferred Sources does—and what it doesn’t
Google describes Preferred Sources as a way to tailor the Top stories, AI Mode and AI Overviews experiences. It changes which websites may appear more often; it is not a Gmail filter, sender whitelist or guarantee that every result will come from your chosen sites. Google says its systems still match a query with relevant, high-quality, fresh content, and users can continue to see other sites. Availability in AI Mode and AI Overviews depends on whether those features are available in your location.
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Google says the feature is available globally for Top stories in languages where Google Search is available. See Google Search Central’s publisher guide for that qualification and details about other Search experiences.
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- Open Google Search or the Google app and sign in if you want the preference saved to your Google Account.
- Select your profile picture or initial, then open Search personalization.
- Select Source preferences.
- Search for the publication’s website and select its checkbox. The source should appear in the Your sources area.
Google notes that sites that are not updated regularly may not be available to select. When you save preferences while signed in, Google says they remain the same in every browser where you sign in to that account. The labels and route are documented in Google’s Preferred Sources help page.
Add a source from Top stories on desktop
This route works when Google shows a Top stories section for your search. It is not available from every query.
- Search for a significant recent event on Google Search.
- If Top stories appears, select the star-shaped control to the right of its heading.
- Search for the publication, select its checkbox, then select Reload results.
To change your choices later, open the same control, select or clear sources, and reload results. Google says selected sources may appear more often in Top stories when they publish fresh content relevant to the query; it does not promise that every Top stories result will come from those sources. The route is described in Google Search Help.
If you received a publication’s email newsletter
A newsletter can include a Google Preferred Sources deeplink. Opening it can prefill the publication’s domain in the source-preferences tool so you can select and confirm the website. That adds the publication’s site as a Search preference; it does not mark the newsletter address or sender as preferred in Gmail. Google documents the deeplink and an optional interactive button for publishers in its Preferred Sources guide.
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Preferred Sources is a personalization choice, not an exclusive-results setting or general ranking boost. Google says chosen sources can appear more often when their content is fresh and relevant, while other sites may still appear. Google reported that users were twice as likely to click through to a site after marking it as a Preferred Source in an announcement dated April 30, 2026; it repeated the claim on May 27, 2026. Those are Google’s reported figures, not an independently established guarantee for an individual user or publication. In its August 20, 2026 announcement, Google said more than 600,000 unique sources had been selected; that is a dated adoption snapshot, not a live total. See Google’s announcements on language availability, AI Search and publisher buttons.
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