Judge dismisses Penske Media and Chegg antitrust suits over Google AI Overviews

Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the long-standing exchange, in which publishers allowed indexing and Google sent traffic, was an expectation and not an agreement. He found publishers let Google crawl their sites because it served their own interests. He had earlier dismissed an Arkansas newspapers' class action on the same grounds, though he said he sympathized with publishers whose work is reused without payment. A separate adtech suit brought by publishers is still going ahead. [2] [17] [1]

Pew's browsing panel of 900 US adults found people clicked results 8% of the time when an AI Overview appeared, against 15% when none did. Only 1% of visits involved a click on a link cited inside the Overview. Google says total organic clicks are roughly stable year over year. DMG Media reported click-through drops of up to 89% in its worst case. Both of those last figures come from the parties themselves and have not been independently checked. [3] [4] [11] [5] [14] [15]

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ordered Google to let publishers keep their content out of AI Overviews and AI Mode without losing search ranking. Google responded with a Search Console toggle that also covers AI Overviews in Discover. The toggle does not cover the Gemini app or model training, Google still uses one crawler for both search and AI, and the CMA has put off rules on fair compensation for at least 12 months. [6] [9] [10] [13]

Google now pays more than 400 publishers, including CNN, Axios and the FT, for content used in AI features in Google News. A separate pilot pays only when content contributes significantly while an answer is being generated, using an attribution method Google has not disclosed. [7] [8] [12]