Penske Media Hits Google With Antitrust Suit Over AI Content

Photo Credit: Rajeshwar Bachu

Google is leveraging its “unlawful monopoly in search” to divert traffic from news sites via AI summaries – at least according to a new antitrust lawsuit from Penske Media.

The Billboard, Variety, and Rolling Stone publisher fired off the in-depth suit this past Friday. Spanning over 100 pages, the complaint dedicates quite a bit of ink to exploring, on one hand, Google’s mentioned search-space dominance.

Also front and center is an emphasis upon the plaintiff’s media reach and perceived reputation for “reliable journalism, strong perspectives, and compelling storytelling.”

At the intersection of these points, Penske maintains that publishers “are forced to acquiesce to” the misappropriation of their works in Google’s AI overviews as well as the wider training process.

And even if an opt-out option was on the table for AI summaries, “publishers would be deterred from” taking advantage due to “the presentation of those features in a way that deprecates search results,” per the legal text.

“Put simply,” the document continues, “Google’s search monopoly gives it control over online distribution in search results for online publishers. Google uses that buying power to force online publishers to give up access to their content without monetary compensation. Google then itself acts as a publisher, either by republishing portions of other online publishers’ content or by using GAI [generative AI] to summarize the content.”

“As a condition of indexing publisher content for search,” another relevant line spells out, “Google now requires publishers to also supply that content for other uses that cannibalize or preempt search referrals.”

On the cannibalize and preempt side: The same AI-generated search-page summaries are said to divert traffic, thereby negatively affecting straight adverts revenue, affiliate-link commissions, subscriptions, and the broader licensing market.

“But if not abated,” the suit sums up, “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.”

In closing, the suit underscores the practices’ bigger-picture impact on web traffic – in part by diving into AI summaries’ precise effect on Penske publications’ readership.

During “recent years,” somewhere around “half of all traffic to PMC websites came from Google,” and “organic affiliate revenues across the portfolio have declined by more than a third [from their peak] by the end of 2024,” according to the action.

Following the allegations to their logical conclusion, Google purportedly “restricts competition” in publishing to the detriment of both companies and consumers. All told, Penske is seeking a massive pile of damages and an order barring “Google from engaging in the unlawful and unfair conduct” described in the complaint.

In a statement, Google spokesperson José Castañeda touted the platform’s AI overviews and briefly pushed back against Penske’s “meritless claims.”

“With AI Overviews,” Castañeda said to DMN, “people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating 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. We will defend against these meritless claims.”