Tired Of AI Slop? Support HotHardware With Google's New Preferred News Feature

It's not hard to understand why so many websites have turned to AI generation. With just a few sentences as a prompt, you can easily generate pages and pages of sensible-seeming text on almost any topic. That's exactly the problem, though: it's sensible-seeming, but surely almost devoid of any real meaning, as the "intelligence" behind it isn't all that intelligent at all. Current AI doesn't "think" or "understand," it merely predicts.

Here at HotHardware, we're one of the last remaining holdouts of the original independent tech press. While we occasionally use generative tools for eye-catching images, we don't use AI for our article text. All of our news and reviews are human-authored and manually edited, with the expertise we've cultivated over decades of practice. When you read something on our site, you can trust that there was a human with intent behind the words—even if we occasionally make mistakes, like the humans we are.


Google has a new feature that can help you surface our stories from the sea of AI slop. If you appreciate what we do and want to see more of it, you can elect to mark HotHardware as one of your "Preferred Sources" for Google searches and news. To do so, simply head to this link on a browser where you are logged in to your Google account.

We tested on Firefox, Edge, Chrome, and Brave browser, and found that it worked on all four, so it's not a browser feature, but something you can set on your Google account. Doing this will help our visibility, as every user that visits one of our links from a Google search helps signal to Google that we present helpful information, and that we deserve to be ranked high in its listings.


Of course, if you'd like to help us out further and support independent hardware and technology news and reviews, you could also elect to make a purchase from our merch store. We've got branded shirts, we've got mugs, and we've got hoodies, all emblazoned with our logo (if you want us to make something else, just let us know!). Every purchase helps to support the site, and you can boast to your friends that you're repping one of the OGs—we've been at it since 1999, after all.