Google Discover now lets you customize your feed by chatting with it

[Sandworm81]

Google announced updates rolling out to the Google app this week that let people customize their Discover feed through a conversational chatbot interface instead of digging through settings menus. Tap the three dot menu on any card in the feed and you get a chat style box where you describe what you want to see more or less of in plain language.

According to Google's own blog post, the system will adjust on the fly and remember requests across sessions, and the chatbot can ask follow up questions if a first request is too vague to act on. The rollout also touches Google News, where users get similar natural language controls over a customizable daily audio briefing covering categories like business, sports, and science and technology.

This is basically the same idea YouTube has been quietly testing on its home feed for a while now, just extended to Discover. Google seems to be betting that natural language becomes the default control layer for every recommendation surface it owns rather than sticking with toggle menus and thumbs up or down signals, and that tracks with where the rest of the industry is heading too.

For publishers there's a side story worth mentioning. Google is also rolling out an embeddable Preferred Sources button that sites can put directly on their own pages, and the company claims over 600,000 unique sources have already been added this way. Preferred publications reportedly get more visibility in Top Stories and can be surfaced inside AI Overviews and AI Mode results, which is a meaningful distribution lever if you run a content site and depend on Google traffic

Google will let you chat with Discover to customize your feedmobilesyrup.com

[Cobra]

Finally, the existing Discover controls have felt buried for years and most people I know just don't bother tuning the feed at all

[Wrench]

The Preferred Sources detail is the part actually worth watching here. If getting surfaced in AI Overviews depends on publishers embedding a button and building up signal through it, that's a whole new SEO adjacent game nobody has fully mapped out yet. Six hundred thousand sources sounds like a lot until you remember how many small publishers and blogs exist worldwide. Early movers on this button are probably going to have an advantage that's hard to catch up to later

[Paul_26]

Every platform copying the same chat with your feed pattern within months of each other is a little funny. X, Instagram, and now Google and YouTube are all converging on nearly identical UX for this

[Vacant Falcon]

Remembering requests across sessions is the feature I actually care about. Every previous version of feed customization I've tried resets itself constantly and you end up retraining it every few weeks for no reason

[NicholasCleverley]

I'm a bit skeptical this actually improves recommendations versus just giving people the illusion of control. Feed algorithms already have a mountain of behavioral signal to work with, and I doubt typed preferences override that in practice once the novelty wears off.

Then again, explicit preference statements catching edge cases the algorithm keeps getting wrong could be genuinely useful, especially for people who feel like their feed got stuck in a rut after clicking one unrelated video or article by accident

[Mia_76]

Worth remembering Google has tried variations on tell us what you want controls in Discover before and most quietly died without much fanfare. The earlier show more, show less buttons never stuck around long enough to change how people actually use the feed.

What might be different this time is that natural language lowers the effort required to actually use the feature at all. Clicking through three menus to tune a preference is friction most people won't bother with, but typing less about sports, more science into a chat box while scrolling takes basically no extra thought. Low effort features tend to get used even when high effort equivalents with the exact same underlying function get ignored

[Sentinel66]

Anyone worried this becomes another vector for publishers to game visibility through prompt style manipulation rather than actual quality content