An industry group that represents publishers has filed an antitrust complaint against Google LLC in the European Union.
Reuters reported the development today.
The Independent Publishers Alliance, the group behind the antitrust push, submitted its complaint to the European Commission on June 30. The document also has two other signatories. They are The Movement for an Open Web, which represents digital advertisers and publishers, and UK nonprofit Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company.
The antitrust complaint focuses on Google’s AI Overviews feature. Released last May, it displays a natural language answer to the user’s query above standard search results.
“Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers,” reads the antitrust complaint.
The document charges that AI Overviews has negatively impacted publishers’ relationship with readers, traffic and revenue. The signatories also take issue with the way the feature uses publishers’ content. The three nonprofits argue that Google doesn’t give publishers a practical way to opt out of content scraping.
“Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google’s AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google’s general search results page,” the signatories wrote in the complaint.
Under the hood, AI Overviews distills web content into summaries using a customized version of Gemini 2.5. One of the algorithm’s publicly-available editions, Gemini 2.5 Pro, is the most advanced language model that Google currently offers to customers. It can process prompts with up to one million tokens. That makes it useful for data-intensive tasks such as analyzing large webpage collections.
In March, Google updated its search engine with another machine learning capability called AI Mode. The feature can answer more complicated questions than AI Overviews. In May, Google rolled out a tool dubbed Deep Search that is capable of answering even more challenging queries.
If EU regulators determine that AI Overviews raises antitrust concerns, they may also scrutinize AI Mode and Deep Search.
According to Reuters, the three nonprofits behind the complaint have also filed a version of the document with the UK’s antitrust regulator. The Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, recently proposed giving Google “strategic market status.” This designation could open the company to new regulatory measures, including restrictions on how AI Overviews uses publishers’ content.
“New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered,” Google said in a statement. “The reality is that sites can gain and lose traffic for a variety of reasons, including seasonal demand, interests of users, and regular algorithmic updates to Search.”
Image: Google
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