Supporting the web with new features and partnerships

Search and many of our products connect people to the web, sending billions of clicks per day and driving revenue for websites and creators of all sizes. It's clear that the web and technology are evolving; people want information faster, they want more context to help them sort through it, and they're looking for authentic connections with creators and sources they trust. Here’s a look at a few new features designed to help users and websites:

New ways to connect with your favorite sources and explore the web

We’re launching new features to help people connect with the sources they value:

• Preferred Sources launching globally: Preferred Sources in Search lets you customize Top Stories to see more from your favorite outlets and sites, and helps websites strengthen their audiences. We’re now launching this feature globally: in the coming days, it will be available for English-language users worldwide, and we’ll roll it out to all supported languages early next year. This builds on the great early feedback we’ve heard from users and websites. People have selected a wide range of preferred sources — nearly 90,000 unique sources, from local blogs to global news outlets. When someone picks a preferred source, they click to that site twice as much on average.

• Easy access to your subscriptions: We’re launching a new feature that highlights links from your news subscriptions, making it easier to spot content from sources you trust and helping you get more value from your subscriptions. We'll also prioritize links from your subscribed publications, and show these links in a dedicated carousel. We’ll bring this capability first to the Gemini app in the coming weeks, with AI Overviews and AI Mode to follow.

We’re also improving how we show links in our AI experiences, to help people explore the web:

• Links in Search AI features: We’re increasing the number of inline links in AI Mode, and updating the design of those links to make them more useful. We’re also adding contextual introductions to embedded links in AI Mode responses. These are short statements that explain why a link might be helpful to visit.

• Expanding Web Guide: We've heard positive feedback from users and websites about Web Guide, which helps people find links they may not have previously discovered and uses AI to organize links into helpful topic groups. It’s especially useful for more complex, open-ended searches. We’ve updated Web Guide to make it twice as fast, and we’re showing it on more searches in the “All” tab on Search for people opted into the experiment.

New partnerships for the AI era

One of the ways we make our products more helpful is through commercial partnerships, in which we pay for extended display rights and content delivery methods like APIs. In the last few years alone, we’ve partnered with over 3,000 publications, platforms and content providers in more than 50 countries and we continue to build on this work.

We’re now piloting a new commercial partnership program with a range of news publishers globally — including Der Spiegel, El País, Folha de S. Paulo, Infobae, Kompas, The Guardian, The Times of India, The Washington Examiner and The Washington Post, among others — to explore how AI can help drive more engaged audiences.

As part of this new AI pilot program, we’re working with publishers to experiment with new features in Google News. For example, we're testing AI-powered article overviews on participating publications’ Google News pages to give people more context before they click through. And we’re experimenting with audio briefings for those who prefer listening. These features will include clear attribution and link to articles.

We’re also partnering with organizations like Estadão, Antara, Yonhap and The Associated Press to include real-time information to enhance results in the Gemini app.

As the way people consume information evolves, we’ll continue to improve our products for people around the world and engage with feedback from stakeholders across the ecosystem. We’re doing this work in collaboration with websites and creators of all sizes, from major news publishers to new and emerging voices.