Google is once again facing legal fire from the publishing world, this time over the company’s controversial AI Overviews. Penske Media Corporation (PMC), owner of titles including Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum, has filed a lawsuit accusing the tech giant of illegally repurposing news content to generate AI summaries that undercut publishers’ business models.
The suit marks the first direct legal challenge against Google and its parent company, Alphabet, over the rollout of AI Overviews. It also signals that the search giant’s long-running tensions with publishers are far from over — only now, the battleground has shifted from traditional search links to AI-driven answers.
PMC’s lawsuit argues that Google has upended the long-standing “exchange of access for traffic” that sustains the open web. Publishers allow Google to crawl their sites in return for visibility and clicks. But with AI Overviews, PMC claims, Google is effectively consuming their journalism to provide instant summaries that reduce the need for users to click through.
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“As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC’s best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth,” CEO Jay Penske said. “Furthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity — all of which is threatened by Google’s current actions.”
The lawsuit goes further, accusing Google of using its dominance to “coerce PMC into permitting Google to republish PMC’s content in AI Overviews” and even to train its AI models.
PMC says it has already experienced “significant declines in clicks from Google searches since Google started rolling out AI Overviews,” which translates into losses across ad revenue, subscriptions, and affiliate deals.
“These revenue streams rely on people actually visiting PMC sites,” the filing states. The only way to opt out would be to withdraw from Google Search entirely — a move PMC calls “devastating.”
Google spokesperson José Castañeda rejected the claims, saying AI Overviews make search “more helpful” and in fact send traffic to a “greater diversity of sites.”
“Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,” Castañeda said. “We will defend against these meritless claims.”
A fight with precedent: from Google News to AI Overviews
The lawsuit echoes earlier showdowns between Google and publishers across the globe.
In Spain, Google shut down its Google News service in 2014 after a law required platforms to pay publishers for using snippets of their content. In France, Google was forced by antitrust regulators to negotiate licensing deals with publishers after years of disputes over the unpaid use of headlines and article previews. In Australia, the 2021 News Media Bargaining Code compelled Google and Facebook to strike agreements with local media companies to compensate them for content that drove platform engagement.
These earlier battles hinged on the same core issue — whether tech platforms profit disproportionately from journalism while undermining the traffic that sustains it. Now, publishers warn that AI Overviews pose an even greater threat by bypassing clicks altogether.
As the lawsuit puts it, Google’s new approach “cannibalizes or preempts search referrals.” Industry voices say this could erode the very foundation of digital journalism, with publishers losing not only advertising income but also subscriptions and brand visibility.
Google itself has inadvertently admitted that the overview undermines publishers’ traffic. In a filing submitted last week, ahead of a trial over its dominance in the advertising technology market, Google acknowledged that “the open web is already in rapid decline.” The admission, spotted by analyst Jason Kint and reported by Search Engine Roundtable, marks a sharp departure from the company’s upbeat public narrative.
Stakes for Google and the industry
For Google, defending AI Overviews is critical to its push to keep search competitive against Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing and a growing wave of generative AI startups. For publishers, the risk is existential: without traffic, they lose revenue, and without revenue, the ability to produce original journalism falters.
The timing adds to the pressure. Google recently avoided being broken up in a U.S. antitrust case, though a judge ruled the company illegally maintained its monopoly in search. European regulators are separately investigating whether AI Overviews violate competition law.
This suit is both a business defense and a symbolic stand for PMC. The company, by suing Google, is effectively declaring that previous fights over licensing were only the beginning — and that the legal showdown over how journalism is treated in the AI age is just getting underway.