You click one story. The feed serves another like it, then another.
Soon, you will be able to answer in plain words: more of this topic, less of that one, fewer links like this. But when the feed listens, who is still choosing?
The answer is clear: you get a say, not control. Google announced three personalization changes Thursday that let people state what they want and which publishers they trust. Google still decides what appears.
The feed gets a direct order
In the coming days, tapping the three-dot menu on an item in the Google app’s Discover feed will open a prompt. People can request more or less of particular topics or links; Google says the feed will adjust and remember.
Android users can now choose subjects for daily audio briefings in Google News. Each briefing identifies the publishers behind its stories and links to the full articles.
Publishers get a route into the conversation, too. They can add a button that lets readers mark the site as a Preferred Source, then return to the article they were reading.
Google’s guidance says that preference can influence Search’s Top Stories and its AI answer features. Discover and Google News have separate controls, and no preference guarantees placement.
A lever, not the wheel
The button arrives when publishers need every route back to readers. Across more than 2,500 sites, organic traffic from Google Search fell by one-third worldwide from November 2024 to November 2025, according to the Reuters Institute. Its evidence does not isolate AI features as the cause.
Google says readers are twice as likely to click through after marking a site preferred. It has not published the methodology, so whether the button can materially recover publishers’ lost traffic remains unknown.
That is the shape of all three changes: a feed can take an instruction, an audio briefing can take a topic, and a trusted outlet can ask a loyal reader to speak up. People have gained levers. Google still holds the wheel.