The parent company of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter has sued Google, alleging that its controversial “AI Overviews” feature is ripping off articles without permission – and crushing traffic in the process.
Filed in Washington DC federal court, the lawsuit from Penske Media accuses Google of causing “millions of dollars of harm” and reaping “illegal profits.” Google mandates that publishers allow their content to be used to train its AI summary feature if they want their links to be included in search results, according to the complaint.
The result, according to Penske, is that Google is robbing publishers of the proceeds they would receive by licensing the rights to their articles or selling advertising based on web traffic that is instead gobbled up by the Big Tech giant’s AI tools.
“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—a once robust but now hollowed-out information ecosystem of little use and unworthy of trust,” the company’s lawsuit says.
The lawsuit is the latest sign of intense pushback from news publishers and content creators over Google’s “AI Overviews” – which adds AI-generated summaries to the top of search results while demoting traditional “blue links” that send readers to other websites.
Aside from hurting the news industry, AI Overviews often spits out blatantly false “hallucinations” — such as its recent false claim that the rapper Eminem performed at the funeral of Jeff Bezos’s mother.
Penske, whose media properties also include Variety and Deadline, said about 20% of Google search results have an AI-generate summary placed above the link to their original work.
The media giant said it has “experienced declines in search impressions and declines in search referral traffic” as Google has expanded use of the feature – at the cost of critical ad revenue.
“With every article it publishes on its websites, PMC is forced to provide Google with more training and grounding material for its [AI] systems to generate AI Overviews or refine its models, adding fuel to a fire that threatens PMC’s entire publishing business,” said the complaint.
Penske wants a permanent injunction barring Google from engaging in illegal conduct, as well as damages.
Google has repeatedly claimed that AI Overviews drives more traffic for websites, not less.
“With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. We will defend against these meritless claims.” Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement.
While some web publishers have cut licensing deals with Google, others have opted to take legal action.
The education software firm Chegg sued Google in February, with its CEO claiming that the tech giant has “unjustly retained traffic that has historically come to Chegg, impacting our acquisitions, revenue and employees.”
Google’s chief AI rival OpenAI has reached licensing deals with The Post’s parent News Corp, as well as Financial Times and The Atlantic.
The industry thought it would be getting a reprieve after US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had an illegal monopoly over online search, where it controls an estimated 90% of the market.
Despite the Justice Department’s warnings that Google would leverage its search monopoly to dominate AI without strong court-ordered remedies, Mehta opted for a lighter-touch approach that critics slammed as a “slap on the wrist” earlier this month.
Google will be forced to share search data with rivals but won’t have to sell off its Chrome web browser or discontinue payments to Apple to ensure its search engine is enabled by default on most smartphones.
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