Buyers no longer open ten tabs, skim through blog posts, and slowly form an opinion over weeks. Instead, they ask a single question to an AI system and receive a shortlist in return, usually two or three companies that feel familiar, credible, and safe enough to justify internally. That shortlist often becomes the entire market in the buyer's mind.
Our content was structured with LLM readability as an explicit goal - not SEO. Consistent terminology, clear entity definition, a named methodology, and topical depth over breadth. LLMs seem to evaluate authority differently than search engines. Google proxies authority through external signals (links, engagement, domain age). LLMs appear to evaluate something closer to conceptual coherence - whether a source demonstrates genuine understanding of a subject in a way the model can parse and trust.
Several weeks after Google rolled out support for Preferred Sources globally, Google added official help documentation for site owners to use to help them understand what it is all about and how to encourage their readers to subscribe to your site as a preferred source. In December, Google rolled out Preferred sources globally after rolling it out in the US and India in August and beta testing it in June. Now the new help documentation is available here if you need it.
The jury's out on screen scraping versus official APIs. And the truth is, any AI agent worth its salt will likely need a mixture of both. AI agent development is off to the races. A 2025 survey from PwC found that AI agents are already being adopted at nearly 80% of companies. And, these agents have an insatiable lust for data: 42% of enterprises need access to eight or more data sources to deploy AI agents successfully, according to a 2024 Tray.ai study.