A lawsuit filed by Penske Media Corporation against Google over the company’s practice of using AI to generate summaries of its news articles in its search engine was dismissed Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta.
In his ruling, the federal judge said that antitrust laws don’t apply to the AI overviews of news stories provided for articles searched on Google.
“Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an ‘expectation’ that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free,” Mehta wrote. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.”
Penske Media Corporation, which owns entertainment trades The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline and Variety as well as other publications like Rolling Stone, Gold Derby, Billboard, IndieWire and Artforum, is one of several news organizations that have sounded the alarm about the negative impact that AI overviews of articles have had on their business. Many websites have faced a drastic downturn in web traffic over recent years, arguing that Google providing AI overviews of articles has depleted clicks into their ad- and subscription-supported reporting. In the suit, PMC alleged that it has lost revenue from the new practice.
When the lawsuit was originally filed in 2025, PMC argued that Google is unlawfully leveraging its search engine by only including publishers that permit the use of their articles in AI summaries in its web search results. PMC also argued that a fifth of Google searches linked to sites also display “Overviews,” and expects that percentage to increase. The lawsuit stated Google should be required to pay publishers to summarize news articles or use them to train its AI systems without this leverage.
PMC and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Chegg, an education platform that joined PMC in the lawsuit alleging Google illegally scraped its comment, also did not respond to a request for comment.
PMC will be allowed to refile its lawsuit against the tech company as it was not filed with prejudice.
