Beyond the files

Google Search lets readers mark a site as a preferred source. Once they do, your content is more likely to surface in Top Stories and carries a “preferred” badge in AI Mode and AI Overviews. There is no file to publish and no markup to add — the button simply prompts a reader to make that choice.

Live example

This is the real button, rendered by Google's script on this page:

Two ways to implement it

<script async
  src="https://news.google.com/swg/js/v1/publisher.js"></script>

<div google-add-preferred-source-btn></div>

<!-- optional -->
<div google-add-preferred-source-btn
     data-theme="dark"
     data-lang="en"></div>

<a href="https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=example.com">
  Add as a preferred source
</a>

Source: Google Search Central — preferred sources

Schema.org Organization data in JSON-LD tells Google who you are in a form it already consumes at scale. Google uses it to disambiguate you from similarly named organisations, to choose which logo to show, and to populate knowledge panel details.

Google recommends placing it on your home page or a single page describing the organisation — an about page — rather than on every page. No property is strictly required; add the ones that are true.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "[Your Brand Name]",
  "legalName": "[Your Registered Business Name]",
  "alternateName": "[Accepted short form]",
  "url": "https://[www.example.com]",
  "logo": "https://[www.example.com]/logo.png",
  "description": "[The same summary used in llms.txt]",
  "foundingDate": "[YYYY-MM-DD]",
  "vatID": "[VAT number]",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "[Street]",
    "addressLocality": "[City]",
    "postalCode": "[Postcode]",
    "addressCountry": "[GB]"
  },
  "contactPoint": {
    "@type": "ContactPoint",
    "email": "[[email protected]]",
    "contactType": "customer support"
  },
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/[handle]",
    "https://github.com/[handle]"
  ]
}

Source: Google Search Central — Organization structured data · Validate with the Rich Results Test

IndexNow lets you tell search engines a URL has changed instead of waiting to be re-crawled. Engines that adopt the protocol agree to share submitted URLs with every other participating engine, so one ping propagates. That matters for AI visibility because assistants sit on top of these indexes — a stale index means stale answers about you.

Setup

1. Generate a key: 8 to 128 characters, letters, numbers and dashes only.
2. Host it as a UTF-8 text file at your root — example.com/{key}.txt — containing the key and nothing else. This proves ownership.
3. Ping on publish or update.

# one URL
curl "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://example.com/page&key=YOUR_KEY"

# many URLs — up to 10,000 per request
curl -X POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "host": "example.com",
    "key": "YOUR_KEY",
    "urlList": [
      "https://example.com/llms.txt",
      "https://example.com/about"
    ]
  }'

A 200 confirms receipt — not indexing. Submit only URLs that genuinely changed; pinging unchanged pages wastes your quota and earns nothing.

Source: IndexNow documentation

Unglamorous, free, and worth more than any of the above if you have not done it.