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Google’s AI Summaries have already stirred up major opposition from the publishing industry since rolling out in May 2024, with trade groups claiming the service is making a serious dent in both their clicks and revenue. Now, Penske Media (PMC), the company behind brands like Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter, is suing Google.
The lawsuit, filed in a federal district court in Washington, D.C., accuses Google of “abusing its adjudicated monopoly in General Search Services to coerce online publishers like PMC to supply content that Google republishes without permission in AI-generated answers.” The suit says the feature violates US antitrust laws and unfairly competes “for the attention of users on the Internet.”
The company’s lawyers go on to claim that “Google’s conduct threatens to leave the public with an increasingly unrecognizable Internet experience, in which users never leave Google’s walled garden and receive only synthetic, error-ridden answers in response to their queries.” PMC claims that 20% of Google search results that link to one of its outlets’ websites include AI overviews and that its affiliate revenue had declined by more than a third by the end of 2024 compared to its peak.
Last month, a member survey from Digital Content Next (DCN), a nonprofit group that represents many of the best-known names in publishing, found that median year-over-year referral traffic from Google Search was down 10% in May and June. Some of the worst-hit publishers reported click-through declines of as much as 25%.
Google has consistently tried to counter claims the tool is hurting publishers, arguing that AI Summaries can actually increase “high-quality clicks,” where users stick around to browse the website, even if overall traffic falls. Liz Reid, VP and Head of Google Search, responded in an official statement that reports that are critical of the tool are “often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the rollout of AI features in Search.”
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Though PMC appears to be the first major US publisher to sue Google over AI summaries in a US court, it’s already facing plenty of legal opposition in other parts of the world. In June, it was hit by a regulatory complaint in the European Union by an industry nonprofit called the Independent Publishers Alliance.
Though there is no way to turn off AI Summaries completely at present, there are plenty of tricks to reduce them.
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