Judge Throws Out Lawsuits Against Google's AI Overviews

A federal judge has dismissed lawsuits filed by publisher Penske Media Corporation (PMC) and ed tech company Chegg against Google, alleging that the search provider's AI Overviews illegally siphon web traffic away from their online ad businesses.

The suits claimed that Google was using its vast index of the web to repurpose content from PMC and Chegg, thereby hurting their revenue. However, Judge Amit Mehta found that neither company convincingly argued that Google was leveraging its monopoly in search services to gain an unfair advantage in digital publishing.

Mehta noted that PMC's expectation that Google would send them search traffic if they made their content available for free did not constitute an agreement. He also stated that Chegg's claim that Google was forcing websites to offer their content up for AI scraping or face being excluded from search results was unfounded.