This morning, Google sent you and five billion other people an email.
It arrived quietly and revealed it was allowing users to personalise their favourite news sources in Google.
Once done, publishers the readers had selected as their favourites would be prioritised in Google search results.
Wow! That’s a big deal.
Today’s mail is the tip of a giant story which first broke the surface in Johannesburg just before Christmas and reveals the direction of Google’s next ad monopoly.
It’s a big story, so this one’s on the house.
Welcome to new subs from the team at Arc XP in Washington DC, the million-sub Substack sensation The Bulwark, high net worth stratcom leaders Buxlow in the UK, leading Aussie travel trade media Karryon, the audience team at The Irish Times, the product visionaries at NDTV in India, leading European news agency alliance EANA, as well as Gruppo Mediaset in Milan, the growth gurus at The Audience Club in Barcelona,, and many more. Great to have you in our growing community. 👋
If you find this valuable, please share it with your networks and friends.
And my thanks to today’s sponsor Cerby. 🙏
⚽ World Cup 2026 is about to kick-off and thousands of publishers will be relying on social media. But are your brand accounts secure? Protect them with Cerby.
Let’s go…
If you’re a regular at Future Media you know that I live by a simple premise: The first rule of tracking Big Tech is to analyse anything it says in detail.
Google’s mail today says it’s changing its $294 billion search ad cash cow to give us all “more control” over search.
We can even tell it which news providers we want at the top of our search results.
But if you look closely, you’ll see Google prioritised search, maps, shopping, hotels, flights and even translations ahead of news.
And that betrays the real reason this is happening.
Alphabet’s banked $402.8 billion last year and 73 cents of every dollar came from the advertising that used to fund publishing and the open web.
And search ads are Google’s biggest earner.
So if Google’s reordering how Search works, it is performing open-heart surgery on the most profitable advertising business ever built.
So there has to be a very big reason.
Today’s Future Media Explains video shares what it is. And the trail leads back to a competition inquiry in Johannesburg in late 2023.
The hidden hand
The Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry launched by South Africa’s Competition Commission was comprehensive.
It stretched over two years and included five rounds of information requests and public hearings where Google was forced to sit in a room and answer tough questions.
The architects of that inquiry joined me on the Future Media Podcast last December.
« Rewind
What made their inquiry different from every other attempt worldwide is that it wasn’t about money. It was about protecting the country’s Constitution.
South Africa has 12 official languages. They’re the architecture of the country’s identity and culture.
But when the inquiry looked under the hood, Google Search supported only three of them. Its constitutionally protected languages simply didn’t exist in search.
And that was a problem.
The regulators used that legal leverage to demand Google’s raw data including its impressions and click-through using the legal information powers it unlocked.
What they found was stark.
Almost half of all news queries from South Africans were redirected by Google to foreign outlets like CNN, Reuters and Bloomberg.
Google argued that was what its users wanted, but the data showed that was a convenient deception.
The data revealed that Google’s South African users were 60 per cent less likely to click foreign links than links to their own publishers.
Google was shown to be systematically serving people the news they didn’t want and burying the news they did.
The Commission did something genuinely clever.
Using Google’s own spreadsheets, it showed it was failing its own customers and covering it up with words.
Google was pressed into a remedy. It would roll out a controversial new solution it had been quietly testing in its labs. It was called Preferred Sources.
The mail in your inbox today is Google now releasing it to the rest of the world.
Rapid reaction
Google’s reputation has been to be very slow and considered in launching major changes - and with good reason given the money involved.
But after criticism for being too ponderous with AI, it has been throwing caution to the wind.
AI Overviews was the fastest expansion in Google’s almost 30-year history and the preferences launch is not far behind.
Look at the timeline.
Mid-2024: Google begins trialing it in Search Labs in US and India, and only in English.
November 2025: South Africa’s final report lands in Google’s inbox demanding Preferred Sources
December 2025: Google commits to releasing it in South Africa early.
April 2026: It was live in every supported language and market.
Two weeks ago: Google extended it into AI Overviews and AI Mode.
This morning’s email is the consumer-facing wrapper around all of that.
Google looked at South Africa’s numbers and learned something. People like personalised results.
More than 345,000 unique sources have already been selected by its users globally.
Personalisation tax
But why is Google suddenly so keen to evangelise the feature?
There are two reasons.
First, it’s a terrific regulatory insurance.
It is in the most intense enforcement period it’s ever faced with antitrust convictions in the US, ad tech remedies pending and inquiries from Brussels to Canberra.
A personalisation dial showing its listening to consumers is the cheapest concession available, and photographs really well in a courtroom.
But there’s something else.
A happy user is an engaged user, and an engaged user is a better advertising target.
When users hand Google their source preferences, travel intentions and shopping tastes, they’re not just curating their experience. They’re completing Google’s profile.
News and niche content drive daily habits. Habits reveal profiles. Profiles drive targeted ad auctions.
And that’s what feeds Google’s monetised funnels of Search, Shopping, Hotels and Flights.
It’s dressing up the next era of targeting, as control. It’s quite clever really.
The bigger picture
For 20 years, personalisation has meant a ranking algorithm that makes a best guess at the users’ preferences based on click data.
It’s been crude, passive and one-size-fits-most - but in the sunsetting era of the open web, Google made the best of it to create a $4.3 trillion mega-monopoly.
But AI is changing the game.
It doesn’t rank an experience, it manufactures one.
Every digital surface can now be assembled fresh, per person, in the moment.
AI Overviews has turned search results pages into publication with a circulation of one. You. 🫵
The South African inquiry found that only 12 per cent of users who saw AI Overviews clicked through to publishers.
It also found that South African news content was only 0.26 per cent of the data Google’s AIs were trained on.
My reporting has so far focused on how publishers are being bypassed by AI Overviews. South Africa’s data proved entire nations were being silenced.
Twelve languages and 60 million people just didn’t factor, until South Africa forced the issue.
What publishers should do
Any day now, the first Future Media Intelligence report will be released to 26,000 publishers by FIPP, part of the world’s largest publisher industry group WAN IFRA.
It contains insights from more than half a billion data points as well as hundreds of interviews over three years to chart a path forward in the AI era.
Preferred Sources uses AI to change the ranking signal of search from the backlink and algorithmic bias of PageRank to one that runs on reader loyalty.
That opens interesting doors for publishers who believe they can push back the tide of AI slop.
But really this is a story about the revival of premium journalism and use it to reduce their 20-year over-reliance on search and social to send clicks.
Show readers how to add you as a Preferred Source. Google has published the how-to. People who care enough to choose you in settings will be the most loyal and valuable - and a distribution signal too.
Change what you measure. Stop tracking page views and start tracking direct-relationship traffic. Readers who type your URL, click a bookmark, or open the newsletter are your real audience. Anonymous traffic never paid the bills.
Double down on the quality of your product. Referrals from Google Search and Meta are down 40-80 per cent since AI Overviews. It’s time to let the readers do the distribution for you.
As Paula Fray, who helped build the South African deal, told me in December: These remedies are a foundation, not a finish line. Let’s build on it.
