Google is now facing a fresh lawsuit that alleges the company unlawfully leverages news publishers’ materials to generate AI-driven summaries, negatively affecting their businesses.
This legal action is initiated by Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which operates well-known outlets such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum. Penske’s lawsuit marks the first time Google and its parent company Alphabet have been specifically sued for displaying AI-created summaries in search results, although similar copyright issues have seen other AI firms targeted by authors and publishers.
“As a leading global publisher, it is our responsibility to safeguard PMC’s outstanding journalists and acclaimed reporting as reliable sources,” stated Jay Penske, CEO of Penske Media. “In addition, we must take proactive steps to defend the future and integrity of digital media — all of which are currently at risk because of Google’s behavior.”
Since Google introduced its AI Overviews last year, the company has faced backlash for undermining the business models of content creators it depends on for accurate AI responses and summaries.
The lawsuit further alleges that Google “continues to use its dominant position to pressure PMC into allowing the republishing of PMC’s content in AI Overviews” and to utilize this material for AI model training purposes.
Google spokesperson José Castañeda responded, stating that AI Overviews make Google’s search “more valuable” and provide “new ways for content to be found.”
“Google delivers billions of clicks to websites daily, and AI Overviews broaden the variety of sites receiving traffic,” Castañeda said. “We plan to contest these baseless allegations.”
According to the lawsuit, while Penske Media permits Google to index its sites in a “transaction of access for traffic,” which is described as “the core agreement sustaining content creation for the open commercial Web,” Google has recently “linked this arrangement to an additional requirement that PMC and other publishers have not agreed to.”
“Google now makes it a condition, for indexing publisher content in search, that publishers must also allow their material to be used in other ways that diminish or replace search-driven referrals,” the lawsuit asserts, noting that Penske’s only alternative would be to withdraw entirely from Google search, a move that would be “catastrophic.”
The suit also contends that since Google began rolling out AI Overviews, Penske has experienced “substantial drops in click-throughs from Google search.” This decline, the company says, means reduced advertising income and also jeopardizes revenue from subscriptions and affiliates: “These income sources depend on users actually visiting PMC’s websites.”
Although Google has dismissed allegations that AI Overviews reduce publisher site traffic, the lawsuit maintains, “Google has not provided any credible evidence to counter concerns about lost search referrals.”
Penske’s complaint follows a recent antitrust case in which Google avoided having to divest parts of its business — although a federal judge found Google maintained a monopoly in online search, the court did not require a breakup, citing growing rivalry in the AI space as part of the rationale.
This article has been revised to include a statement from Jay Penske.
