16 Sept 2025
This is the first time Google is being sued over AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of its search results.
Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, Variety, and Billboard, sued Google in the Washington, D.C., Federal Court. It claims that Google use its journalistic content without consent, thus reducing traffic to its websites.
It alleges that around 20% of Google search results linked to Penske websites show AI overviews, and its revenue has fallen by over a third from 2024-end.
Penske pointed out that Google includes publishers’ websites in search results only if it can use their content in AI summaries. It could impose such terms due to its search dominance. Without this, Google would end up paying the publishers for the right to republish their work or use it to train their AI systems.
Penske attracts 120 million online visitors per month.
Several news organisations have also argued that Google’s AI Overviews pull traffic away from their sites, thus hogging their ad and subscription revenue.
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