A US federal judge has dismissed antitrust lawsuits filed by Chegg and Penske Media against Google over its AI search products, ruling that the publishers describe economic harm but not illegal conduct.
Both suits, filed in 2025, centred on AI Overviews and other AI answers that summarise web content directly in search results, which publishers say has drained traffic from their sites. Chegg, an education platform, argued Google scraped its material illegally so that Gemini models could effectively reproduce it. Penske, which owns Rolling Stone and Variety, argued it was unfair that pages indexed for organic search would also have their content harvested for AI answers with no way to opt out.
Judge Amit Mehta was not persuaded. "Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an 'expectation' that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free," he wrote. "But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works." Because no formal arrangement existed between Google and either publisher, the court found antitrust law did not apply.
Mehta — who also presided over the Justice Department's search monopoly case against Google — was explicit that the outcome is not an endorsement. The court is "not unsympathetic" to publishers and to the knock-on effects for journalists, educators and other online creators whose work, he wrote, Google "takes and repurposes without compensation", but held that antitrust statutes cannot stand in for legislation nobody has written. Publishers may find more traction abroad: the European Commission is weighing the same questions, and the UK has ordered Google to offer an AI opt-out to sites that want to remain in organic results. Google has also been testing direct payments to sites that feed AI answers, a pilot reportedly unpopular with publishers.
