Google Search Console emails started reaching site owners today with a figure on how many people have marked a domain as a preferred source in Google Search, according to Search Engine Roundtable. Each message carries one number, tied to data from the previous day, and links to a short survey on whether such reporting belongs inside Search Console itself.

In Short

Google sent emails today to some website owners telling them how many people have picked their site as a "preferred source" in Google Search, which is a setting that makes a chosen site show up more often for that reader. Until now Google had published only overall totals for the whole feature, so a site-by-site number is new to the people who run those sites. For now the figure lives only inside the email, not in the Search Console dashboard, and Google is asking site owners in a survey whether they want it added.

What the emails contain

According to Search Engine Roundtable, the messages tell site owners how many people are subscribing to or following them as a preferred source on Google. The heading reads "people are choosing domain as a preferred source", with the recipient's domain filled in, and a line labelled "Preferred source selections" follows. Barry Schwartz, who wrote the report, published a screenshot of an email he received for a Search Console property he has access to. The property name is blurred in the image, and the selections line in that screenshot reads 4,345.

The body text restates the feature in a sentence. Preferred Sources lets Google Search users "choose the publications they want to see most", and a site that readers select can appear more often across Top Stories, AI Overviews and AI Mode, per the email as reproduced in the report. The data is stamped "as of 2026-10-05", one day before the message arrived.

Search Engine Land also reported the emails. According to Search Engine Land, they went to some site owners rather than to every property owner, which fits a comment under the Search Engine Roundtable article from a reader who wrote that no email had reached him. The reports reviewed for this article do not say how Google chose recipients.

Below the figure sit two recommended actions, according to Search Engine Roundtable. The first is to install the JavaScript button, described as two lines of HTML that embed an interactive control on a page. The second is aimed at sites that already carry the older static image button: switching to the JavaScript version lets users add the site in fewer steps. A third link leads to a survey that the email says takes two minutes.

The survey

The survey has seven questions. Respondents are asked whether they knew of Preferred Sources before the report, how clearly the email explained what a "Preferred Source user count" means, and how helpful it is to learn how many users chose the site. Two questions cover delivery: by what channel such reporting would reach site owners, and, if by email, how often. A sixth asks which metrics would matter most if the reporting lived inside Search Console, ranked from 1 for most valuable to 4 for least valuable. The seventh is open text for other metrics.

The four candidate metrics in the ranking question are not named in the Search Engine Roundtable write-up. Google has not said whether a Search Console report will follow the survey.

Reaction from search practitioners

Kyle Sutton, Head of SEO and AI Discovery at The Washington Post, posted a screenshot of an email addressed to washingtonpost.com, with the figure obscured. He described the messages as a nudge to add the call to action and called the number "a first and quite helpful to correlate known CTR to selections". Click-through rate data for Search already sits in Search Console, so a per-site selection count would give publishers a second series to set beside it.

Nati Elimelech wrote that the email was the first time he had seen such a count and that the number appears only in the message. His check of Search Console turned up no matching report: "No report in GSC that I can find." Glenn Gabe said a flurry of the emails had arrived and that seeing the data inside Search Console would be welcome. All three posts are dated October 6.

What the number does and does not say

Several details of the figure remain undefined in the material published so far.

  • Unit. The email says "selections". Sutton refers to users, Schwartz to people subscribing or following, and the survey to a "user count". Whether the figure counts distinct accounts, active designations or all designations ever made is not stated.
  • Window. The line is dated 2026-10-05, which reads as a snapshot, but nothing published indicates whether it is cumulative or limited to a period.
  • Eligibility. Google's publisher documentation limits preferred-source selection to domain-level and subdomain-level sites, as PPC Land documented on April 30, 2026. How a Search Console property set up at directory level would be treated is not addressed.
  • Delivery. The survey asks about frequency, which implies that no schedule has been set.

Technical background: how a site gathers selections

The button the email promotes is the mechanism Google released on August 20, 2026. The standard integration needs two lines. A script tag loads a library from news.google.com under the /swg/js/v1/publisher.js path, placed in the head element, and a div carrying the google-add-preferred-source-btn attribute is dropped at the spot where the button is meant to render. A data-theme attribute accepts light or dark, with light as the default, and a data-lang attribute overrides the button language, which otherwise follows the reader's browser settings. When a reader clicks, the site is added as a preferred source and the reader returns to the point on the page where the click began.

An advanced path exists for sites that want their own design assets, and a deeplink remains for content management systems that cannot run the script. The deeplink points to google.com/preferences/source with the domain passed as a query parameter. Before the script button, the main method was downloadable image assets in 16 languages, which Google added to its guide in the April 30, 2026 refresh. The email's reference to "existing buttons" appears to concern that earlier asset-based approach.

How the new figure sits beside earlier disclosures

Until today the public numbers measured the feature as a whole.

DateFigureWhat it measures
December 10, 2025nearly 90,000unique sources selected, all readers combined
May 27, 2026more than 345,000unique sources selected, all readers combined
August 20, 2026more than 600,000unique sources selected, all readers combined
Today (data as of 2026-10-05)4,345 in one screenshotselections for one Search Console property

The first three rows come from PPC Land's coverage of the December 2025 global expansion, the May 27 move into AI Overviews and AI Mode and the August button release. As PPC Land noted in August, the total counts unique sources, not selections made and not the readers making them, so a source picked by one reader and a source picked by a million readers each count once. The per-site email figure addresses that gap from the other side, because it speaks to one property at a time. It still leaves open how many readers hold selections overall, how often a preferred badge appears, and what share of a site's Google traffic comes from designated readers. PPC Land observed in August that Search Console exposes no preferred-source dimension, and Elimelech found no matching report today.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For publishers and the media buyers who depend on their inventory, the question has long been whether a mechanism that Google describes in terms of doubled click-through has any measurable footprint on a given site. Google has said that readers click twice as often on a source they have selected, and PPC Land reported in August that the company has not disclosed the baseline behind that comparison or whether the effect decays over time. A site-level count does not supply the baseline. It does give publishers one input for testing the claim against their own click-through figures, which is the use Sutton described.

The figure also bears on how the tool distributes visibility. A PPC Land analysis of May 30, 2026 argued that Preferred Sources rewards publishers who already command loyal audiences and offers little to newer or smaller sites, since a reader has to know a publication before designating it. Per-site counts would make that skew visible in actual numbers, at least to the recipients, and could show how widely selections are spread between large and small properties if Google ever publishes the distribution. It has not done so.

The backdrop is the traffic pressure documented across 2025 and 2026. PPC Land's April 30 coverage cited research showing Google Web Search falling from roughly 51% to 27% of referrals to news and media sites between 2023 and 2025. Against that, a signal that readers grant directly, and that now carries a number, draws attention from site owners who see few other levers. Whether the number moves into Search Console, stays in periodic emails or disappears after the survey is the open item. No date for a decision appears in the published material.

Timeline

Summary

Who - Google Search Console, the reporting service for site owners, with reactions from Kyle Sutton of The Washington Post, Nati Elimelech and Glenn Gabe, and coverage by Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land. Publishers and site owners are the recipients.

What - Emails stating the number of "Preferred source selections" for a property, with recommended actions to install or upgrade the JavaScript button and a link to a seven-question survey about future reporting. The count is not available in the Search Console interface.

When - Today, October 6, 2026, with data stated as of 2026-10-05.

Where - In site owners' inboxes, sent from Search Console. The feature itself operates in Google Search across Top Stories, AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Why - Google has not stated its reason. The survey indicates the company is gauging demand for Preferred Sources reporting, and one practitioner noted that the number could be set beside click-through data. The definition of the figure, the recipient list and any move into Search Console remain unconfirmed.