Google’s AI Overviews can keep summarizing the web’s content. The publishers who said that practice broke the law just lost twice.
On Wednesday, US District Judge Amit Mehta threw out antitrust lawsuits filed by education company Chegg and publishing giant Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, which accused Google of repackaging their content into AI Overviews and bleeding away their web traffic. Mehta, who also delivered the 2024 ruling that Google illegally monopolized online search, said the new claims against the company “fail to get out of the starting gate.”
That’s a quote from the opinion itself, and it sets the tone. The judge wasn’t confused about who has the monopoly. He just didn’t buy that a monopoly in search turns AI-generated summaries into an antitrust violation.
The claim in the Google AI Overviews lawsuit: index or be summarized
The two cases (Chegg Inc v. Google LLC, 25-cv-543, and Penske Media Corp v. Google, 25-cv-3192, both in federal court in Washington, DC) made a simple argument with an ugly implication. Chegg filed first in February 2025; Penske followed later. Both said Google tied two things together: if you wanted to stay indexed in Google’s search results, you had to let the company feed your content to its AI Overviews, with no separate opt-out.
That, the publishers argued, was Google leveraging its search dominance to force a deal on its own terms. In a competitive search market, they said, Google would have to pay for their material — license it, compensate them for training data, or at least negotiate. Instead, they got a take-it-or-leave-it arrangement: hand over your articles for summarization, or disappear from the results page entirely. Their traffic, and the ad revenue riding on it, collapsed in the middle.
It’s not a made-up complaint. Across the media industry, publishers and small sites have reported sharp traffic drops since Google rolled AI Overviews and AI Mode out to everyone. The plaintiffs were the first to put the accusation in a courtroom.
The ruling: “an expectation is not an agreement”
Mehta’s memorandum opinion dismantled the argument piece by piece, and his central line is the one publishers will have trouble getting past: “Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an ’expectation’ that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free. But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.”
That’s the heart of the Google AI Overviews lawsuit dismissal. You can publish on the web for free. You can hope Google sends readers your way. What you can’t do, under antitrust law, is demand Google send them on your terms. Google countered, and the judge agreed, that it has no obligation to index publishers’ content on the conditions they prefer.
The court also rejected the monopolization claims under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Under the standard consumer-demand test, Mehta found that AI Overviews and Google Search aren’t separate products. They’re one integrated search function that answers queries. Without a distinct product to tie, the tying claim collapsed.
To his credit, Mehta didn’t pretend the publishers were fine. He wrote that he is not “unsympathetic” to the situation of publishers and online creators “whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation.” But, he continued, antitrust laws don’t substitute for legislators’ power to decide how to handle the economic damage new technology causes. That’s Congress’s problem, in other words — not his.
Why publishers keep losing this fight
This wasn’t the first swing and a miss. In March, Mehta rejected similar claims from another publisher suing Google, according to Reuters. A pattern is getting hard to ignore: courts will call Google a monopolist, as Mehta did in 2024, and still rule that the monopoly doesn’t entitle publishers to a cut of the traffic machine.
Then there’s the irony. The Verge, which has reported on this ruling, is owned by Penske Media, the very publisher that just lost. That means some of the news industry’s sharpest writers on this issue work for a company that couldn’t convince a court its traffic was being taken illegally.
Chegg and Penske didn’t respond to requests for comment, Reuters reported, and Google didn’t either. The company has consistently denied any wrongdoing. The dismissals were with prejudice as to the federal antitrust claims, which means the plaintiffs can’t simply refile the same charges in the same court.
What this means
For Google, the ruling is a clean win and a precedent it will wave at every publisher still thinking about suing. The “expectation is not an agreement” line is now case law for the AI-summary era, and it’s going to travel. Any future Google AI Overviews lawsuit has to explain why this one failed, and Mehta’s answer (that indexing is how a search engine works, not a contract) is brutally simple.
For publishers, the message is equally plain: the courts won’t fix your traffic problem. Antitrust law, as written, wasn’t built for a world where the answer box eats the click. If there’s a remedy, it’s in Washington — a legislative deal on licensing or compensation, the kind that would require Congress to decide publishers deserve one.
And for the rest of the web? The AI Overviews box isn’t going anywhere. Google is expanding AI Mode, training on the same corpus, and the courts have now said twice, by the same judge, that none of that is Google’s antitrust problem. The open web’s economic crisis didn’t get a legal answer this week. It got a shrug with footnotes.
Sources: Reuters, Engadget
FAQ
Why did the judge dismiss the Google AI Overviews lawsuit?
US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled the antitrust claims “fail to get out of the starting gate,” finding that publishers have only an expectation — not an agreement — that Google will send them search traffic, and that AI Overviews do not violate antitrust law.
Who sued Google over AI Overviews?
Education company Chegg and publisher Penske Media, which owns Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, sued Google in 2025, accusing it of repackaging their content into AI Overviews and siphoning away web traffic.
What did the judge say about publishers’ lost traffic?
Judge Mehta said he was not “unsympathetic” to publishers whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation, but held that antitrust law can’t substitute for Congress’s power to address the economic fallout of new technology.
Can publishers opt out of Google’s AI Overviews without losing search traffic?
Not under the court’s ruling. The judge found Google has no obligation to index publishers’ content on their preferred terms, so publishers can’t use antitrust law to force a separate opt-out for AI summaries.