Federal judge dismisses Chegg and PMC antitrust suits against Google AI Overviews

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta on Wednesday dismissed two antitrust lawsuits filed by Chegg and Penske Media Corporation, the parent company of Rolling Stone, which alleged that Google exploits its monopoly power in search to divert traffic from publisher sites through its AI Overviews feature. The ruling removes, at least for now, a significant legal threat to the model in which Google displays AI-generated summaries directly on the results page.

The suits, filed last year, argued that Google coerces publishers into providing content for free to train and populate AI Overviews, with the implied threat that refusal would lead to disappearance from standard search results. The plaintiffs claimed the practice siphoned traffic from their sites and directly damaged advertising and subscription revenue. Mehta, who issued a landmark 2024 ruling that Google holds an illegal monopoly in search, did not accept the argument this time.

Mehta wrote that the plaintiffs presented only an "expectation" that Google would continue sending them search traffic if they allowed free crawling of their content, but such an expectation is not a binding agreement — it is simply how a general search engine operates. The court, he added, is not "unsympathetic to the plight in which publishers now find themselves," but antitrust law cannot substitute for a legislative decision that would address the economic impact of "new innovation."

Meanwhile, the trend the plaintiffs complained about continues on the ground: news sites and smaller publishers report a sharp drop in traffic following Google's AI-driven search overhaul. The judge acknowledged that reality in his opinion but declined to turn it into a legal cause of action under existing law.

This week The Information reported that Google is paying roughly 100 publishers for contributing content to AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini under a pilot program. The move may signal a future model in which Google shares revenue with content providers, though for now it remains a limited experiment rather than broad policy.

Disclosure: The Verge, which reported on the ruling, is owned by Penske Media Corporation, one of the plaintiffs in the dismissed case.