Judge tosses antitrust claims by Chegg and Penske against Google's AI Overviews

A federal judge has dismissed antitrust lawsuits filed by Chegg and Penske Media Corporation, the owner of Rolling Stone, over Google’s AI Overviews search feature. US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled on Wednesday that the publishers’ claims do not hold up under antitrust law, according to Reuters.

Chegg and Penske Media Corporation (PMC) sued Google last year, arguing the company abused its monopoly power in search by pressuring publishers to let their content feed AI Overviews, a feature that generates AI-written summaries at the top of search results. The companies said that refusing to supply that content risked disappearing from Google search results entirely, and that once it ran, AI Overviews pulled traffic away from their own sites and cut into their revenue.

Mehta rejected that framing. He wrote that the publishers had only shown they held an “expectation” that Google would send them search traffic in exchange for making their content freely available, and that an expectation does not amount to an agreement. “It is simply how a general search engine works,” he wrote.

A sympathetic but narrow ruling

Mehta, who issued a landmark antitrust ruling against Google in 2024 in a separate case over its search dominance, did not dismiss the publishers’ underlying complaint out of hand. He wrote that the court is not “unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in.” But he said antitrust law cannot substitute for a legislative response to the economic fallout of “new innovation,” placing the question of how to address AI’s effect on publishers’ business models outside the court’s reach.

The ruling does not resolve the broader tension between Google and the publishing industry. Traffic to news outlets and smaller websites has dropped sharply since Google rolled out its AI-driven search overhaul, a trend that has continued regardless of the legal outcome in this case. Separately, The Information reported this week that Google is paying about 100 publishers for their contributions to AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini as part of a pilot program, a sign that the company is experimenting with compensation even as it fends off legal claims that it owes publishers nothing.

The Verge, which reported on the ruling, disclosed that it is part of Penske Media, one of the plaintiffs in the dismissed case.

What happens next will likely play out on two separate tracks. In court, Chegg and PMC could appeal Mehta’s dismissal or refile narrower claims, though his reasoning sets a high bar for any publisher trying to argue that lost search traffic alone amounts to an antitrust violation. Outside court, the real pressure point may be Google’s publisher-payment pilot: whether it expands beyond roughly 100 outlets, and on what terms, will shape whether publishers see this as a legal loss offset by a commercial fix.