Rolling Stone Owner Sues Google Over AI Summaries

On September 12, the owner of high-profile publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, and more, Penske Media Corporation (PMC), sued Google and parent company Alphabet over its AI overview feature. Penske alleges the feature steals revenue from the company and allows Google to act as a de facto monopoly.

The AI overview feature works by allowing Gemini, Google’s proprietary large language model (LLM), to comb indexed sites and use that information to display an AI-generated answer to users’ queries. Google displays the generated answer at the top of all search results, which, according to Penske, then steals traffic from the sites themselves.

In the suit, PMC argues that Google functionally coerces publishers into providing free content for Google’s own traffic, which breaches US antitrust laws. This is important because many online publishers generate the bulk of their revenue through advertising deals that are directly affected by site traffic.

“Because AI overviews and Featured Snippets often provide answers to user search queries, and because the answers are featured advantageously on Google’s [search engine results page], they generate lower click-through rates to the original sources from which Google generates the answers, if Google provides links to those sources at all,” reads the complaint.

Penske also argues that Google only displays publishers’ websites in its search results if it can also use their content for AI overviews. Since the company holds nearly 90% of the US search market, publishers can’t afford not to appear in its search results. This, Penske argues, effectively forces publishers to provide Google with the material its AI requires for free.

In a statement, Google spokesperson José Castañeda said that AI overviews create “new opportunities for content to be discovered.” “Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,” Castañeda said. “We will defend against these meritless claims.”

Earlier this year, a coalition of publishers from the EU and the UK filed a similar, ongoing lawsuit against Google, arguing that Google’s AI overviews breach local antitrust laws and could cause “irreparable harm” to independent publishers.