US District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought by Penske Media Corporation and Chegg against Google over its AI Overviews feature, according to Press Gazette and Engadget.
Penske, which owns Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Rolling Stone, alleged that AI Overviews cut its organic affiliate revenue by more than a third from its peak through the end of 2024 by repackaging its content instead of sending readers to its sites, Press Gazette reported. Chegg made a similar claim and said Google forced sites to supply content for AI summaries or risk exclusion from search results, according to Engadget.
Mehta found neither publisher could show a "formal bargain" existed with Google promising traffic in exchange for crawling access. "An expectation is not an agreement," he wrote, according to both outlets. He also rejected Penske's claim that search and AI Overviews were unlawfully tied together, ruling they function as one integrated product, Press Gazette reported.
Mehta did not dismiss the harm outright. "The court does not treat Plaintiffs' alleged harms lightly," he wrote, adding he was "not unsympathetic" to publishers whose content Google reuses without payment, according to Engadget.
Mehta is the same judge who ruled in 2024 that Google holds an illegal search monopoly. His reasoning here, that nothing about how search has always worked amounts to a contract, is now the template for publishers trying to turn an AI traffic complaint into an antitrust case.