Publishers have spent two years arguing that Google's AI Overviews — the AI-written summaries now sitting at the top of the search results — quietly take the traffic that used to flow to their websites. On Wednesday, a federal judge told them that grievance, however real, is not yet an antitrust case.
US District Judge Amit Mehta granted Google's motion to dismiss in full, in the consolidated case brought by education company Chegg and Penske Media Corporation, the owner of Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard. The publishers argued that search has always run on an unwritten bargain: publishers let Google index their work in exchange for referral traffic, and AI Overviews break that bargain by answering questions without a click.
Mehta's response cut to the contract problem. "An expectation is not an agreement," he wrote, according to Engadget — treating the unwritten trade as too vague to establish the kind of coordination the Sherman Act requires. He acknowledged that publishers suffer real harm, but said antitrust law is not a substitute for legislation.
The dismissal does not end the fight so much as redirect it. If a deal never existed in writing, then the remedy publishers want — rules about how search results are assembled and how AI summaries cite their sources — has to come from Congress or a regulator rather than a courtroom. It also leaves intact the wider problem the suits pointed at: a search experience that increasingly answers questions in place, and a publishing economy still being repriced by that shift.
For Google, the ruling removes a legal overhang at a moment when it is already defending its search distribution in other proceedings and shipping new models. For everyone else, it is a reminder that being harmed and being able to prove a violation are two different things.
