Google was sued on Friday by the owners of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, who claimed that the tech giant’s AI summaries utilize their work without permission and lower website traffic.
Penske Media’s complaint in federal court in Washington, D.C., is the first action filed by a major U.S. publisher against Alphabet-owned Google about the AI-generated summaries that are now shown above its search results.
News outlets have been complaining for months that the new features, such as Google’s “AI Overviews,” divert users from their websites and reduce advertising and subscription income.
According to Penske, a family-owned media company run by Jay Penske and whose work has 120 million monthly internet visitors, Google only displays publishers’ websites in its search results if it is able to utilize their material in AI summaries.
In the complaint, Google said that without the leverage, it would have to compensate authors for the right to republish their work or use it to train its artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It also stated that Google’s search dominance allowed it to enforce these rules, citing a federal court’s conclusion from the previous year that the tech giant controlled about 90% of the US search industry.
According to Penske, Google’s present activities endanger digital media’s integrity and future, thus there is a need to aggressively defend it.
The company said that 20% of Google searches which link to its websites now display AI Overviews, a percentage it anticipates increasing. It also stated that, as search traffic decreased, its affiliate revenue had dropped by more than a third from its high by the end of 2024.
In February, the online learning startup Chegg also filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that the search engine giant’s AI-generated summaries were decreasing demand for original material and making it harder for publishers to compete.
In response to Penske’s complaint, Google stated on Saturday that AI overviews improve user experience and drive visitors to more diverse websites.
Users find Search more useful and utilize it more frequently with AI Overviews, which opens up new avenues for content discovery. These baseless accusations will be refuted. According to Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesperson.
Earlier this month, a court granted the corporation a rare antitrust victory by deciding that it would not be required to offer its Chrome browser as part of its attempts to increase search engine competition.
The decision left publishers without the option to opt out of AI overviews, according to the News/Media Alliance, which was among the industry groups and publishers that expressed disappointment.
“Google has the market power to not engage in those healthy practices, so all of the elements being negotiated with every other AI company don’t apply to them,” Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, a trade group that represents more than 2,200 U.S.-based publishers, told on Friday.
“When you have the huge scale and commercial power that Google does, you are not required to follow the same standards. That’s the issue.”
Coffey brought up the topic of AI license agreements that companies like OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, have been making with publications including News Corp, Financial Times, and The Atlantic. Google, which rivals ChatGPT with its Gemini chatbot, has been slower to make these agreements.
