Judge dismisses lawsuits alleging Google AI previews siphon off web traffic

A federal judge has dismissed lawsuits filed by publisher Penske Media Corporation (PMC) and education technology company Chegg, which alleged that Google’s AI previews illegally misdirected readers by repackaging their online content. Reuters reports. In an opinion brief on both lawsuits, Judge Amit Mehta, coincidentally the same judge who ruled that Google maintains a monopoly on online search services in 2024, said the companies failed to argue that the search provider violated antitrust laws.

PMC and Chegg’s original lawsuits claimed that Google used AI Overviews and its vast index of the web to siphon traffic from their online advertising businesses, thereby hurting their revenue. Chegg also said that Google was effectively forcing websites to offer their content for AI scraping or risk being excluded from search results.

Judge Mehta rejected both requests for various reasons, but concluded generally that neither company convincingly argued that Google was exploiting its monopoly to get them to provide free hardware for its AI, or that the search engine was trying to gain an unfair advantage in digital publishing. “Plaintiffs simply pleaded that they expected Google to send them search traffic if they made their content available for free,” Mehta wrote. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It’s just how a general search engine works.”

Woozad has asked PMC and Chegg to comment on the opinion memorandum. We will update this article if we receive a response.

Other publishers have raised concerns about how their content contributes to Google’s AI search capabilities, but the situation isn’t entirely clear. Publishers can exclude web pages from using AI previews, but they will still be listed in traditional search results. With more and more search results pages being taken up by AI Mode and AI Previews, it’s easy to see why this might not be a satisfactory compromise.