Penske Media Slaps Google With Amended Antitrust Lawsuit

Photo Credit: Karollyne Videira Hubert

Billboard and Rolling Stone owner Penske Media has taken its Google antitrust lawsuit to the next level with an amended complaint. Meanwhile, the court has rejected the tech giant’s dismissal motion.

Penske submitted the 108-page amended action yesterday, after filing the original suit in September. As we reported then, the company is accusing Google of leveraging its search “monopoly” by effectively compelling publishers to consent to providing content for AI summaries and training.

With the ill-advised alternative being to exit Google’s search results outright (“no digital publishers can afford to take such drastic action”), publishers are allegedly “caught between either permitting Google’s [AI features] underpayment or suffering existential search traffic declines,” the voluminous suit maintains.

Additionally, the gen AI summaries are allegedly fueling the “cannibalization” of web traffic to actual sites – and, among other things, causing advertising revenue to slip, per the text.

“PMC’s hard-won success, however, is at risk if consumers no longer need to visit PMC’s online properties to obtain the benefits of its high-quality content because they can get it—or an apparent facsimile—directly on Google’s” search pages, the amended suit sums up.

“More importantly, consumers lose too, as Google erodes the revenue that PMC uses to fund creation of authoritative, original, and trustworthy content—thus undermining publisher incentives to continue to invest in the creation of new content,” the text proceeds.

We needn’t guess how Google feels about the allegations; the search mainstay moved to dismiss the “legally defective” suit last month. But as initially highlighted, the presiding judge has rejected the motion as moot given the amended action.

Regarding what that amended action brings to the table, in general, Penske has placed a greater emphasis on expert examples and hard market-impact data. This includes added quotes from People’s Neil Vogel and Inspired Taste’s Adam Gallagher concerning Google’s alleged dominant market position and the AI-related consequences thereof.

“According to March 2025 data collected by Pew,” another new section reads, “users who encountered an AI Overview clicked on a traditional search result link in just 8% of all visits.”

The amended suit also features a fresh search-centered tying claim and elaborates on Penske’s reciprocal dealing allegations: “Similar to a tying claim, a claim of coercive reciprocal dealing involves a party’s leveraging of its market power to force another party to purchase from or sell to it, thus gaining competitive advantage from market power rather than competitive merit.”

Finally, the list of plaintiffs is shorter this time around; Penske subsidiaries like Sourcing Journal, Sportico, Vibe, Artforum, and ARTnews, mentioned multiple times in the original complaint, are no longer parties to the suit.