Penske Media Sues Google Over AI-Generated Summaries in Search Results

Rolling Stone owner Penske Media sues Google over AI summaries | TechCrunch

Google faces a new lawsuit accusing the company of illegally using news publishers' content to create AI summaries that damage their business. The lawsuit comes from Penske Media (PMC), which owns industry publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum. While Penske's suit is the first targeting Google and its parent company Alphabet over showing AI-generated summaries in search, both publishers and authors have sued other AI companies over related copyright concerns. Since launching its AI Overviews last year, Google has been criticized for threatening the business models of the same publishers it relies on to provide the content needed to create accurate AI summaries and answers. The new lawsuit goes farther by accusing Google of continuing to "wield its monopoly to coerce PMC into permitting Google to republish PMC's content in AI Overviews" and to use that content "for training and grounding its AI models." Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement that AI Overviews make Google search "more helpful" and 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." The lawsuit argues that while Penske allows Google to crawl its websites in an "exchange of access for traffic" that is "the fundamental bargain that supports the production of content for the open commercial Web," Google has recently "begun to tie its participation in this bargain to another transaction to which PMC and other publishers do not willingly consent." "As a condition of indexing publisher content for search, Google now requires publishers to also supply that content for other uses that cannibalize or preempt search referrals," the lawsuit claims, adding that the only way for Penske to opt out would be to remove itself from Google search entirely, which would be "devastating." The lawsuit also claims that Penske has seen "significant declines in clicks from Google searches since Google started rolling out AI Overviews." That means less ad revenue for the publisher, and it also threatens subscription and affiliate revenue, Penske says: "These revenue streams rely on people actually visiting PMC sites." And while Google has pushed back against complaints that AI Overviews reduce traffic to publishers, the lawsuit says, "Google has offered no credible competing information regarding search referral traffic." Penske's suit comes after Google seemingly dodged an antitrust bullet -- while a federal judge had ruled the company acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, the judge did not to order the company to break up its businesses (for example by selling Chrome), due in part to an increasing competition in AI.

Google's AI Overviews 'Misconduct' Undermines Publishers Who Create Content, Lawsuit Says

Imad is a senior reporter covering Google and internet culture. Hailing from Texas, Imad started his journalism career in 2013 and has amassed bylines with The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, Tom's Guide and Wired, among others. Penske Media, which owns publications including Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard, is suing Google, alleging that the search giant is illegally using their content and that of other publishers to fill out the AI Overviews that have become a fixture at the top of Google search results. In a lawsuit filed Friday in US District Court for the District of Columbia, Penske argues that Google's "misconduct" through its monopoly in online search has coerced publishers to acquiesce to misappropriation of their content, diverting readers away from publishers' own sites and depriving them of the ability to earn money from content created by their journalists. "It is reasonably foreseeable that Google's forced entry into the online publishing output market will result in less traffic to other online publishers, less revenue to the online publishers that actually generate their own content, and, as a result, less online publishing content for consumers," Penske's complaint says. In 2024, that same district court ruled that Google illegally protects its search monopoly. Earlier this month, Judge Amit Mehta issued the penalty finding in that case, saying that the company must share some of its search data with competitors. Google on Monday pushed back against Penske's lawsuit, saying that it is providing a valuable service. "Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites," said José Castañeda, a policy communications manager at Google. "We will defend against these meritless claims." Penske didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The company also publishes The Hollywood Reporter, Indiewire, WWD (Women's Wear Daily), ArtNews, ArtForum and more. For decades, there's been a mutual relationship between online publishers and Google. By indexing sites across the internet, the search giant can deliver up-to-date and relevant information for people's queries. In exchange for letting Google - which has a nearly 90% share of the search market - crawl their sites, publishers get traffic through those search results, so long as people have reason to click through. Don't miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source. With the advent of generative AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, however, that relationship is changing. Instead of you having to take the time to scour through lists of links, and then read through a selection of articles and webpages, you get a neatly synthesized summary in seconds that combines information from the AI tools' training data and directly from the web. A wide spectrum of publishers and authors has contended that AI companies trained their AI models without proper licensing and are profiting from high-quality human-made content. For that reason, some have sued OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) Meanwhile, data shows that whenever AI Overviews appear in search, there is a noticeable drop in clickthrough rate to the source material. Google claims that AI sends "higher quality clicks" to sites, meaning those visitors stay on those sites longer with more engagement. The outcome of the Penske lawsuit will likely have significant implications for both publishers and AI companies, including Google. "If Penske wins, it would likely lead to platforms needing to negotiate licensing deals with publishers for the right to include summaries in search or overview features," said Robert Rosenberg, an intellectual property partner at Moses Singer, a New York-based firm. A ruling might also dictate what is considered "transformative" work - that is, not subject to copyright protections - or could lead to further regulatory pressure on Google, Rosenberg said. "This case highlights how dominant platforms can impose their own terms because of their scale."

Google thinks it can have AI summaries and a healthy web, too

One of Google's top executives defended its use of AI summaries in search results during an AI summit in New York on Monday. When asked about a new lawsuit by Rolling Stone's parent company, Penske Media Corporation, over Google's AI Overviews, the company's vice president of government affairs and public policy Markham Erickson said user preferences are shifting away from "factual answers" provided by original websites to the contextual summaries provided by AI Overviews, which appear at the top of the main page of search results. The company's goal, Erickson said, is to maintain a "healthy ecosystem" with both AI summaries and regular search results, sometimes referred to as 10 blue links. Evidence has emerged recently that suggests that search traffic plummets with AI summaries. In its lawsuit, Penske alleged that this drop in search traffic leads to a decline in revenue for online publishers. Here is what Erickson said when asked about the lawsuit: So, I don't want to speak about the specifics of the lawsuit, but I can speak to our philosophy here, which is, look, we want a healthy ecosystem. The 10 blue links serve the ecosystem very well, and it was a simple value proposition. We provided links that directed users free of charge to billions of publications around the world. We're not going to abandon that model. We think that there's use for that model. It's still an important part of the ecosystem. But user preferences, and what users want, is also changing. So, instead of factual answers and 10 blue links, they're increasingly wanting contextual answers and summaries. We want to be able to provide that, too, while at the same time, driving people back to content, valuable content, on the Internet. Where that valuable content is for users, is shifting. And so it's a dynamic space. Ultimately, our goal is to ensure that we have an overall healthy ecosystem.

Rolling Stone, Variety Publisher Sues Google Over AI Summaries

Don't miss out on our latest stories. Add PCMag as a preferred source on Google. 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." 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.

Rolling Stone, Billboard owner Penske sues Google over AI overviews

Sept 13 (Reuters) - The owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety sued Google on Friday, alleging the technology giant's AI summaries use its journalism without consent and reduce traffic to its websites. The lawsuit by Penske Media in federal court in Washington, D.C., marks the first time a major U.S. publisher has taken Alphabet-owned (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google to court over the AI-generated summaries that now appear on top of its search results. News organizations have for months said the new features, including Google's "AI Overviews," siphon traffic away from their sites, eroding advertising and subscription revenue. Penske, a family-owned media conglomerate led by Jay Penske and whose content attracts 120 million online visitors a month, said Google only includes publishers' websites in its search results if it can also use their articles in AI summaries. Without the leverage, Google would have to pay publishers for the right to republish their work or use it to train its AI systems, the company said in the lawsuit. It added Google was able to impose such terms due to its search dominance, pointing to a federal court's finding last year that the tech giant held a near 90% share of the U.S. search market. "We have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity - all of which is threatened by Google's current actions," Penske said. It alleged that about 20% of Google searches that link to its sites now show AI Overviews, a share it expects to rise, and added that its affiliate revenue has fallen by more than a third from its peak by the end of 2024 as search traffic declined. Online education company Chegg (CHGG.N), opens new tab also sued Google in February, alleging that the search giant's AI-generated overviews were eroding demand for original content and undermining publishers' ability to compete. Responding to Penske's lawsuit, Google said on Saturday that AI overviews offer a better experience to users and send traffic to a wider variety of websites. "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. A judge handed the company a rare antitrust win earlier this month by ruling that it will not have to sell its Chrome browser as part of efforts to open up competition in search. The move disappointed some publishers and industry bodies, including the News/Media Alliance which has said the decision left publishers without the ability to opt out of AI overviews. "All of the elements being negotiated with every other AI company doesn't apply to Google because they have the market power to not engage in those healthy practices," Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, a trade group representing more than 2,200 U.S.-based publishers, told Reuters on Friday. "When you have the massive scale and market power that Google has, you are not obligated to abide by the same norms. That is the problem." Coffey was referring to AI licensing deals firms such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI have been signing with the likes of News Corp, Financial Times and The Atlantic. Google, whose Gemini chatbot competes with ChatGPT, has been slower to sign such deals. Reporting by Aditya Soni, additional reprting by Rhea Rose Abraham and Nilutpal Timsina in Bengaluru Editing by Shri Navaratnam Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Rolling Stone's parent company sues Google over AI Overviews

While Penske Media is the biggest name to take on Google over its AI Overviews, it's not the first. Online education company Chegg sued Google in February, as did a group of independent publishers in Europe. The News / Media Alliance has also spoken out about the feature, calling it the "definition of theft" and seeking action from the DOJ. Google spokesperson José Castañeda defended the summaries to the Wall Street Journal saying, "with AI Overviews, people find search more helpful and use it more." But Penske and other publishers say there is little reason to follow the links provided in search results and, as a result, they have seen significant drops in traffic and revenue. Penske claims in the suit that revenue from affiliate links is down by over 1/3 this year, and it attributes that directly to a drop in traffic from Google.

Google faces its first AI Overviews lawsuit from a major US publisher

Even though Google's AI Overviews were introduced with a comically rocky start, it's about to face a far more serious challenge. Penske Media, the publisher for Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard and others, filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming the tech giant illegally powers its AI Overviews feature with content from its sites. Penske claimed in the lawsuit that the AI feature is also "siphoning and discouraging user traffic to PMC's and other publishers' websites," adding that "the revenue generated by those visits will decline." The lawsuit, filed in Washington, DC's federal district court, claims that about 20 percent of Google searches that link to one of Penske's sites now have AI Overviews. The media company argued that this percentage will continue to increase and that its affiliate revenue through 2024 dropped by more than a third from its peak. Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said that the tech giant will "defend against these meritless claims" and that "AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites." Earlier this year, Google faced a similar lawsuit from Chegg, an educational tech company that's known for textbook rentals. Like Penske Media, this lawsuit alleged that Google's AI Overviews hurt website traffic and revenue for Chegg. However, the Penske lawsuit is the first time that Google has faced legal action from a major US publisher about its AI search capabilities. Beyond Google's legal troubles, other AI companies have also been facing their own court cases. In 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI, claiming the AI company used published news articles to train its chatbots without offering compensation. More recently, Anthropic agreed to pay a $1.5 billion settlement in a class action lawsuit targeting its Claude chatbot's use of copyrighted works.

Rolling Stone Publisher Sues Google Over AI Overview Summaries

Google has insisted that its AI-generated search result overviews and summaries have not actually hurt traffic for publishers. The publishers disagree, and at least one is willing to go to court to prove the harm they claim Google has caused. Penske Media Corporation, the parent company of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter, sued Google on Friday over allegations that the search giant has used its work without permission to generate summaries and ultimately reduced traffic to its publications. Penske's argument is pretty simple: by showing an AI-generated summary of an article at the top of the page via Google's AI Overview panel, users have little reason to click through to read the full article, resulting in dwindling traffic finding its way to the publisher's platforms, which it needs in order to monetize its content, either through ads or subscriptions. The search engine, the company argues, uses its monopoly over search to basically make publishers give up access to their content for next to nothing. Notably, Penske claims that in recent years, Google has basically given publishers no choice but to give up access to its content. The lawsuit claims that Google now only indexes a website, making it available to appear in search, if the publisher agrees to give Google permission to use that content for other purposes, like its AI summaries. If you think you lose traffic by not getting clickthroughs on Google, just imagine how bad it would be to not appear at all. A spokesperson for Google, unspurprisingly, said that the company doesn't agree with the claims. “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 told Reuters. That has basically been the company line since rumbles of traffic declines started getting louder. Last month, the company published a blog post in which it claimed that click volume from Google Search results to websites has been "relatively stable year-over-year"â€"notably without offering a definition for what "relatively stable" is. The company also made the case that "click quality" has increased, so people who do click through are spending more time on the sites they get sent to. That doesn't match up with what publishers claim to be seeing. DMG Media, owner of the Daily Mail, claims click-through-rates by as much as 89% since AI Overviews were rolled out. A Wall Street Journal report from earlier this year said Business Insider, The Washington Post, and HuffPost have all reported traffic declines. Pew Research also found that people don't click through nearly as often when an AI overview is available, finding that people who are served search results that don't have an AI summary click through to an article nearly twice as often as those who see an AI-generated result. Just for kicks, if you ask Google Gemini if Google's AI Overviews are resulting in less traffic for publishers, it says, "Yes, Google's AI Overview in search results appears to be resulting in less traffic for many websites and publishers. While Google has stated that AI Overviews create new opportunities for content discovery, several studies and anecdotal reports from publishers suggest a negative impact on traffic." It might be fun to ask Google, "Are you lying about AI Overview's impact on traffic, or is your AI assistant providing false and unreliable information?"

Google is being sued for its AI summaries

Google is being taken to court over its AI Overview. According to Penske Media, owner of Rolling Stone, Variety, and other publishers, the search giant's AI tools have used its articles illegally, and furthermore, have damaged revenues as a result. This is the first time Google's AI summaries have been challenged in court, and it could provide a heavy precedent for similar AI tools. Penske is arguing Google's actions are outside its original terms Could AI summaries be damaging websites? AI summaries are the paragraphs that show up at the top of many Google searches, and they're compiled by Google's AI, after pulling information from numerous other websites. While Google holds that these summaries are a benefit to the sources being cited and linked to, it seems that some publishers believe differently. Penske Media is the first publisher to stand up against Google in this way though, and it has claimed in its lawsuit that Google's AI summaries are not only harmful to the industry as a whole, but are also using content illegally. "As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC's best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth," said Penske Media CEO Jay Penske said in a statement to TechCrunch. "Furthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity -- all of which is threatened by Google's current actions." Google has strenuously denied these claims, and holds that AI Overviews allow Google to send traffic to more sites than ever before. The lawsuit alleges that the opposite is true, and visits and ad revenue have dropped since AI Overviews were launched last year. In fact, the lawsuit goes as far as to state that while Google claims summaries are a boon to publishers, "[it] has offered no credible competing information regarding search referral traffic." Surely then the answer is to pull out of Google altogether? Penske Media handwaves this away as a "devastating" outcome, effectively arguing that Google's massive portion of web traffic allows it to foist unfavorable terms on publishers. After all, some traffic is better than no traffic. While this is the first time Google has been targeted by a lawsuit like this, it is currently facing an antitrust complaint in the EU, and narrowly avoided having to sell the web browser Chrome in a recent US antitrust case. Ironically, Google only avoided having to break up its empire due to competition from other AI bots. Other AI creators have been targeted by other companies, most notably a recent case where authors brought a class action lawsuit against Anthropic, which led to a massive $1.5 billion payout.

Google says users want summaries over links as it tries to balance 'a healthy ecosystem' amid AI Overview lawsuit

As AI takes over search, Google is saying that users want summaries over the traditional "10 blue links," all while a new lawsuit targets AI Overviews for their harm to the rest of the web. Over the past couple of years, Google Search has put increasingly heavy emphasis on summaries generated by AI, in turn taking some of the focus away from traditional links. While Google has said that traffic sent to the rest of the web is still "relatively steady" despite the emphasis on AI Overviews, major publishing group Penske Media has opened a lawsuit against Google. The lawsuit attributes major drops in Penske's affiliate revenue to a loss of traffic originating from Google due to AI Overviews. It further takes issue with the lack of choice where Penske and other publishers can either continue to feed into AI Overviews or block themselves from Search altogether, which would be devastating for any website today. Penske, the publisher behind The Hollywood Reporter and Rolling Stone, among others, isn't the only one who's taken issue with Google's shift to AI. Earlier this year, the News/Media Alliance said that AI Mode "[deprives] publishers of... both traffic and revenue" and called the practice the "definition of theft." But Google's vice president of government affairs and public policy, Markham Erickson, has an interesting take on the situation. When asked about the Penske lawsuit at an AI summit earlier today, Erickson explained how user preferences are changing, and how Google wants to balance meeting what their users want while still supporting the "ecosystem" built from how the classic "10 blue links" have worked in the past. Erickson says that user preferences are shifting from "factual answers and... links" to "contextual answers and summaries," but that Google still wants to provide a way for users to get back to the "valuable content" on the web. Erickson's comments follow (via The Verge): So, I don't want to speak about the specifics of the lawsuit, but I can speak to our philosophy here, which is, look, we want a healthy ecosystem. The 10 blue links serve the ecosystem very well, and it was a simple value proposition. We provided links that directed users free of charge to billions of publications around the world. We're not going to abandon that model. We think that there's use for that model. It's still an important part of the ecosystem. But user preferences, and what users want, is also changing. So, instead of factual answers and 10 blue links, they're increasingly wanting contextual answers and summaries. We want to be able to provide that, too, while at the same time, driving people back to content, valuable content, on the Internet. Where that valuable content is for users, is shifting. And so it's a dynamic space. Ultimately, our goal is to ensure that we have an overall healthy ecosystem. Notably, this comes shortly after Google admitted in a lawsuit that "the open web is in rapid decline." Google also recently argued that

Rolling Stone, Variety owner sues Google over AI overviews

According to the complaint filed in federal district court in Washington DC on Sept. 12. PMC is suing Google for using its content without its consent in the search giant's AI Overviews feature. AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries that appear at the very top of Google's search engine results pages. These AI summaries pull from websites and other third-party sources and display the summaries right on Google's own search pages. News organizations have reported that these AI Overviews have resulted in a loss of traffic, which in turn has hurt advertising and subscription revenue. PMC's complaint states that the company has experienced traffic and revenue declines attributed to the roughly 20 percent of Google search results that include an AI Overview and a link to one of the company's publications. "As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC's best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth," PMC's founder, chairman, and CEO Jay Penske said in a statement provided to multiple outlets. "Furthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity - all of which is threatened by Google's current actions." The lawsuit also accused Google of forcing publishers into AI Overviews without their consent, as these companies depend on Google's web crawlers to index their websites on its search engine in exchange for traffic. Google has already pushed back on the lawsuit, arguing that AI Overviews actually helps publishers. "With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered," Google Spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement. "We will defend against these meritless claims." A recent Pew Research Center study aligns with some of PMC's claims regarding Google's AI Overviews' impact to publishers. The study found that Google Search users were half as likely to click on a link if the search results page included an AI Overviews summary. In addition, the study found that only 1 percent of users that were served with AI Overviews clicked on a link to the source material that the summary was derived from. In response to this study, Google told the Register in July that they believe Pew used a "flawed methodology" and disagreed with its findings. Google as well as other AI companies are facing multiple lawsuits over content issues. Edutech company Chegg filed a lawsuit against Google earlier this year over its AI summaries. Last October, News Corp's Dow Jones and New York Post sued Perplexity over its AI "copying" their work. A group of news organizations, including The New York Times, have also taken OpenAI to court over copyright issues.

Publishers shift AI ire to Google

Why it matters: IP owners that are heavily reliant on Google's search engine for traffic have been reluctant to target the tech giant. Now that their traffic has started to dramatically decline, any incentive to play nice is over. Driving the news: Rolling Stone publisher Penske Media Corporation on Friday sued Google, alleging the company illegally uses its journalism to power AI summaries and reduces traffic to its sites. * People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel last week called Google an "intentional bad actor" by having the same bot crawl sites for its search engine and its AI features while speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. * Google may not feel required to strike publisher deals because of its market position, Vogel and other media executives stressed Monday while speaking at Condé Nast's office for Wired's AI Power Summit. Zoom in: "Given Google's scale, size and market condition, they need to come to a place of playing ball," Vogel said Monday. "They are using all of their tools to ensure we do not get leverage." * Vogel said publishers blocking AI scrapers with Cloudflare has sparked more calls from AI companies. Except that's not the case with Google. * "Maybe because they don't have to," Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff said. "This is not my opinion, other cases have found they have a dominant position." Reality check: Google's massive win earlier this month -- avoiding major penalties as part of a landmark Justice Department antitrust lawsuit -- lessens pressure on the tech giant to avoid further scrutiny by striking publisher deals. The other side: Google has suggested AI overviews makes the search experience better and send higher quality traffic to more sites. Google's vice president of government affairs and public policy Markham Erickson addressed dealmaking on a separate panel at Wired's event. * "This tension between fair use and exclusive rights actually encourages conversation and encourages parties to get together to have deals. We at Google, we've started to do that," he said. * Asked about the Penske lawsuit, Erickson said he couldn't address specifics but emphasized Google's goal for a "healthy ecosystem" and noted users' increasing desire for "contextual answers and summaries." Yes, but: Gannett CEO Mike Reed disputed Erickson's remarks from the earlier panel. * "The insinuation this morning that AI overview is not getting in the way of the 10 blue links and the traffic going back to creators and publishers is just 100% false," Reed said. * "[Google said] 'we are sending more qualified audience than ever to publishers,' and that's just simply not true," Bankoff said. "The irony is we have Google Analytics that shows us that the traffic is less engaged, spending less time on the site and there's a lot less of it. We need to have good faith conversation." Between the lines: Lacking any real legal threats, Google to-date has signed only a few strategic AI partnerships with publishers. * Google said its deal with the AP, announced in January, provides a "feed of real-time information" for its Gemini app. * The Reddit deal, signed in 2024, gave Google access to the social media platform's content for training and is reportedly worth about $60 million per year. The big picture: Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said he sees value in licensing deals but warned they may not be enough if the courts consider AI companies' actions to be "fair use."

Penske Media sues Google over AI search overviews

Why it matters: The antitrust suit marks the first time Google has been challenged by a major U.S. publisher in court over AI search, setting up a potentially defining clash over compensation in the AI era. * "As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC's best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth," Jay Penske, chairman, founder and CEO of PMC, said in a statement to Axios. * "Furthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity - all of which is threatened by Google's current actions." Zoom in: PMC filed the suit Friday in federal district court in the District of Columbia. PMC lists itself and its individual titles as plaintiffs, including The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone and Billboard. * PMC said about 20% of Google search results that link to a PMC site include AI overviews and it expects that percentage to increase. The lawsuit also said PMC's affiliate revenue has declined by more than a third by the end of 2024 compared to its peak, citing search traffic declines. * "Siphoning and discouraging user traffic to PMC's and other publishers' websites in this manner will have profoundly harmful effects on the overall quality and quantity of the information accessible on the Internet," the lawsuit said. * "If unchecked, these anticompetitive practices will destroy the business model that supports independent journalism," it continued. The other side: Google has argued AI overviews send traffic to a wider variety of sites and make the search experience better. * "With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered," Google spokesperson José Castañeda said. "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." The big picture: Google's AI overviews pull information from across the web and display answers without requiring a user to click through to the site. Publishers have referred to this threat as "Google Zero."

Rolling Stone's owner, Penske, is suing Google over AI overviews

The owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety sued Google on Friday, alleging the technology giant's AI summaries use its journalism without consent and reduce traffic to its websites. The lawsuit by Penske Media in federal court in Washington, D.C., marks the first time a major U.S. publisher has taken Alphabet-owned Google to court over the AI-generated summaries that now appear on top of its search results. News organizations have for months said the new features, including Google's "AI Overviews," siphon traffic away from their sites, eroding advertising and subscription revenue. Penske, a family-owned media conglomerate led by Jay Penske and whose content attracts 120 million online visitors a month, said Google only includes publishers' websites in its search results if it can also use their articles in AI summaries.

Rolling Stone owner Penske sues Google over AI Overviews

Penske is accusing Google of hurting its revenue using AI-generated search summaries. Penske, the owner of leading entertainment publications including Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety, has filed a lawsuit against Google and its parent Alphabet over AI Overviews. The publishing giant and its 14 subsidiaries are accusing Google of damaging their business by using their content for its own AI-generated search summaries. Google was declared a search monopoly in a landmark ruling last year. According to Penske, the search giant "exploits its dominance in search to coerce" publishers to fork over proprietary content. Google republishes this content without permission in AI-generated answers that unfairly compete for user attention, it added. It explained that publishers allow Google to crawl their websites and index content for visibility and clicks-generation, adding that this exchange is the "fundamental bargain that supports the production of content" on the internet. Although, it accused the company of tying this necessary bargain with a demand that content creators supply their work for generative AI uses, such as in AI overviews - something publishers do not "willingly" consent to. The lawsuit claims that Google wants to become a search destination rather than an internet guide for other websites. However, it does so without creating its own content, but rather by taking others', and invariably affects publishers' revenue, it said. "As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC's (Penske Media Corporation) best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth," commented Penske Media CEO Jay Penske in a statement. "Furthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity -- all of which is threatened by Google's current actions." While Google spokesperson José Castañeda in a statement said: "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." The complaint was filed on 12 September in the US District Court for the District of Columbia by the same legal team which represented book authors in an AI copyright lawsuit against Anthropic. While yet to be ironed out, Anthropic has agreed to settle with the class of authors for $1.5bn. Google's AI Overviews have been criticised ever since its launch last year. The AI-generated summaries appear on the very top of the results page, holding search traffic back on the company's own page. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that a group of independent publishers filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission against Google for its AI Overviews. While popular edtech Chegg accused Google of harming its business by displaying its proprietary content on AI Overviews, essentially blocking traffic to Chegg's website. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Penske Media sues Google over AI summaries, claims abuse of search monopoly - SiliconANGLE

Penske Media sues Google over AI summaries, claims abuse of search monopoly Penske Media Corp., the company behind media brands such as Rolling Stone and the Hollywood Reporter, has filed a lawsuit against Google LLC claiming that Google is abusing its monopoly in general search to coerce publishers into handing over their content for free in ways that bolster Google's own artificial intelligence products. The case is specifically focused on Google's AI summaries, a feature that now appears at the top of Google searches that summarizes answers. Penske claims that the summaries repurpose its journalism without permission, divert readers away from original articles and unlawfully exploit its content to train and power Google's AI models while cutting into the company's traffic and revenue. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that Google conditions the sale of "Search Referral Traffic" -- the flow of users to publisher websites -- on publishers also providing three other distinct products: snippets Google republishes in its search results, articles and media for training its Gemini AI models and content used for retrieval-augmented generation in AI Overviews. According to Penske Media, the arrangement constitutes unlawful reciprocal dealing and monopoly leveraging under the Sherman Act, because publishers like Penske Media cannot realistically opt out without losing critical traffic from the world's dominant search engine. Penske argues that Google's use of AI summaries diverts users away from original reporting, reduces ad and affiliate revenues by suppressing click-throughs and unjustly enriches Google by allowing it to build and market AI features powered by third-party journalism. The lawsuit sets out six counts: reciprocal dealing in violation of Sherman Act §1 and §2, unlawful monopoly leveraging, monopolization, attempted monopolization and common-law unjust enrichment. "As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC's best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth," said Penske Media Chief Executive Officer Jay Penske in a statement reported by Yahoo Finance. "Furthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity -- all of which is threatened by Google's current actions." Penske is seeking treble damages, a permanent injunction halting the alleged practices, restitution or disgorgement of profits earned from its content and attorneys' fees. The company is also demanding a jury trial. In response to the lawsuit, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told The Wall Street Journal that "With AI Overviews, people find search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered" and that "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," Castañeda added. Penske's lawsuit is not the first targeting Google over its use of AI summaries ahead of search results. Education technology company Chegg Inc. filed a suit in February that claimed similarly, saying that the AI summaries ahead of search results have hurt the online education company's traffic and revenue.

Rolling Stone, Billboard Owner Penske Sues Google Over AI Overviews

(Reuters) -The owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety sued Google on Friday, alleging the technology giant's AI summaries use its journalism without consent and reduce traffic to its websites. The lawsuit by Penske Media in federal court in Washington, D.C., marks the first time a major U.S. publisher has taken Alphabet-owned Google to court over the AI-generated summaries that now appear on top of its search results. News organizations have for months said the new features, including Google's "AI Overviews," siphon traffic away from their sites, eroding advertising and subscription revenue. Penske, a family-owned media conglomerate led by Jay Penske and whose content attracts 120 million online visitors a month, said Google only includes publishers' websites in its search results if it can also use their articles in AI summaries. Without the leverage, Google would have to pay publishers for the right to republish their work or use it to train its AI systems, the company said in the lawsuit. It added Google was able to impose such terms due to its search dominance, pointing to a federal court's finding last year that the tech giant held a near 90% share of the U.S. search market. "We have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity - all of which is threatened by Google's current actions," Penske said. It alleged that about 20% of Google searches that link to its sites now show AI Overviews, a share it expects to rise, and added that its affiliate revenue has fallen by more than a third from its peak by the end of 2024 as search traffic declined. Online education company Chegg also sued Google in February, alleging that the search giant's AI-generated overviews were eroding demand for original content and undermining publishers' ability to compete. Responding to Penske's lawsuit, Google said on Saturday that AI overviews offer a better experience to users and send traffic to a wider variety of websites. "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. A judge handed the company a rare antitrust win earlier this month by ruling that it will not have to sell its Chrome browser as part of efforts to open up competition in search. The move disappointed some publishers and industry bodies, including the News/Media Alliance which has said the decision left publishers without the ability to opt out of AI overviews. "All of the elements being negotiated with every other AI company doesn't apply to Google because they have the market power to not engage in those healthy practices," Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, a trade group representing more than 2,200 U.S.-based publishers, told Reuters on Friday. "When you have the massive scale and market power that Google has, you are not obligated to abide by the same norms. That is the problem." Coffey was referring to AI licensing deals firms such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI have been signing with the likes of News Corp, Financial Times and The Atlantic. Google, whose Gemini chatbot competes with ChatGPT, has been slower to sign such deals. (Reporting by Aditya Soni, additional reprting by Rhea Rose Abraham and Nilutpal Timsina in BengaluruEditing by Shri Navaratnam)

Who is Jay Penske? Owner of media giant Penske Media Corporation which spelled fresh legal trouble for Google over AI overviews; all you need to know

Penske Media Corporation, led by Jay Penske, has sued Google, alleging that its AI summaries infringe on their journalism and reduce website traffic. This lawsuit marks the first instance of a major U.S. publisher challenging Google's AI-generated summaries in court. Penske claims Google's dominance forces publishers to allow their content to be used in AI summaries, impacting revenue. Penske Media Corporation, a family-owned media conglomerate led by Jay Penske, which owns Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, sued Google on Friday (September 12, 2025), alleging the technology giant's AI summaries use the journalism done by it without consent and reduce traffic to its websites. The lawsuit by Penske Media in federal court in Washington DC., marks the first time a major U.S. publisher has taken Alphabet-owned Google to court over the AI-generated summaries that now appear on top of its search results. According to Reuters, news organizations have for months said the new features, including Google's "AI Overviews," siphon traffic away from their sites, eroding advertising and subscription revenue. Penske, whose content attracts 120 million online visitors a month, said Google only includes publishers' websites in its search results if it can also use their articles in AI summaries. Jay Penske was born in New York City on May 5, 1979. He is one of five children born to Roger Penske. He is the Chairman, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Penske Media Corporation (PMC) and Chief Executive Officer, Dick Clark Productions According to the PMC website, he is a graduate of The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, with concentrations in Finance, Management, and Information Systems, and was formerly on the board of the Wharton Entrepreneurial School, and the University of Pennsylvania Library Board of Directors. Jay currently sits on the Board, or as an Advisor to several companies including PMC, SXSW, Vox Media, Paley Center for Media among others. He has a net worth of $250 million. He is also known for 60th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards (2025), Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2025 (2024) and ENTV Minute (2012), according to IMDb. PMC successfully owns and operates an ever-growing constellation of iconic brands, which includes Variety, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Billboard Music Charts, WWD, SHE Media, Robb Report, Deadline, Sportico, BGR, ARTnews, Fairchild Media, Vibe, IndieWire, Dirt, Artforum, Gold Derby, Spy.com and Luminate, the premier music SAS data and analytics company. Penske Media also owns Dick Clark Productions (DCP) the world's largest producer and owner of televised live entertainment programming, which includes the Academy of Country Music Awards, Golden Globe Awards, American Music Awards, Billboard Music Awards, New Year's Rockin Eve, Streamy Awards, and television programs such as So You Think You Can Dance. In addition, PMC owns several vital cultural events such as SXSW, LA3C, Life is Beautiful, Latin Music Week and ATX Television Festival. In addition, Penske Media is the largest shareholder of Vox Media. Without the leverage, Google would have to pay publishers for the right to republish their work or use it to train its AI systems, the company said in the lawsuit, Reuters reported. It further stated that Google was able to impose such terms due to its search dominance, pointing to a federal court's finding last year that the tech giant held a near 90% share of the U.S. search market. "We have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity - all of which is threatened by Google's current actions," Penske said. It alleged that about 20% of Google searches that link to its sites now show AI Overviews, a share it expects to rise, and added that its affiliate revenue has fallen by more than a third from its peak by the end of 2024 as search traffic declined. According to Reuters, Online education company Chegg also sued Google in February, alleging that the search giant's AI-generated overviews were eroding demand for original content and undermining publishers' ability to compete. Responding to Penske's lawsuit, Google said on Saturday that AI overviews offer a better experience to users and send traffic to a wider variety of websites. "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. A judge handed the company a rare antitrust win earlier this month by ruling that it will not have to sell its Chrome browser as part of efforts to open up competition in search. The move disappointed some publishers and industry bodies, including the News/Media Alliance which has said the decision left publishers without the ability to opt out of AI overviews.

Google Sued By Rolling Stone, Billboard Owner Penske Media Over AI Overviews Feature - Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)

Penske Media, owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, has filed a lawsuit against Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL Google over the use of AI-generated summaries. AI Overviews Reduces Website Traffic, Affects Revenue, Says Penske Media The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C., marks the first instance of a major U.S. publisher taking legal action against Google over AI summaries, according to a report by Reuters. Penske alleges that Google's AI Overviews use its journalism without permission, reducing website traffic and affecting revenue. Penske Media, led by Jay Penske, claims Google only includes publishers' sites in search results if it can use their content in AI summaries. Without this leverage, Google would need to compensate publishers for republishing their work or using it to train AI systems. See Also: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says He Hasn't Had 'A Good Night Of Sleep Since ChatGPT Launched' Google's Search Dominance The lawsuit highlights Google's dominance in the search market, with a near 90% share, as a factor allowing it to impose such terms. Penske noted that about 20% of Google searches linking to its sites now show AI Overviews, a figure expected to rise, leading to a significant drop in affiliate revenue. Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda defended the AI Overviews, stating they enhance user experience and increase content discovery opportunities. Meanwhile, the News/Media Alliance, representing over 2,200 U.S. publishers, expressed concerns over Google's market power and its impact on AI licensing deals. Not An Isolated Incident The lawsuit by Penske Media is not an isolated incident. Earlier this year, Chegg Inc. CHGG also sued Google, alleging that its AI-generated search overviews unfairly used publishers' content, reducing site traffic and threatening the future of online publishing. This legal action underscores a growing concern among publishers about the impact of AI on their business models. In August, Japanese media giants Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the AI platform of illegally storing and misusing their articles. Read Next: Steve Jobs Says Smart People Excel At This When Learning New Things, Science Shows He Had A Point Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Photo courtesy: JHVEPhoto via Shutterstock.com GOOGLAlphabet Inc$240.400.01%Stock Score Locked: Edge Members Only Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Unlock RankingsEdge RankingsMomentum86.68Growth79.28Quality84.64Value40.95Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewCHGGChegg Inc$1.9119.4%GOOGAlphabet Inc$240.830.02%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Google's AI Overviews Hit Sour Note With Rolling Stone | PYMNTS.com

The report noted that the suit is the first time a major American publisher has sued Google over the AI-generated summaries that have come to top its search results. In this case, Penske is accusing Google of only including publishers' websites in search results if it can also use their articles in AI summaries. Absent this leverage, Google would be forced to pay media companies to republish their work or use it to train its AI systems, Reuters added, citing the lawsuit. The suit added that Google was able to dictate these terms due to its dominant position in the online search market, citing a court ruling last year that found the company owned nearly 90% of that market. "We have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity -- all of which is threatened by Google's current actions," Penske said. PYMNT has contacted Google for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. A company spokesperson told Reuters that the AI overviews offer a better user experience and direct traffic to an array of sites, and that the company will defend itself against what it called "meritless" claims. Google introduced AI Overviews in May 2024, saying they would frequently show up at the top of search results, often replacing traditional website links. PYMNTS reported at the time that this change aimed to offer users speedier access to information but could alter how businesses think about search engine optimization (SEO) and online advertising. The Penske lawsuit is one of several pieces of litigation involving news publishers, writers and media companies who accuse the AI sector of improper use of their material. Last week, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a high-profile copyright violation lawsuit in a case involving a group of authors who accused the startup of illegally accessing their books. This latest suit comes two months after the Independent Publishers Alliance filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission, claiming that Google's AI Overviews are an abuse of the company's online search market power. The alliance argues that by placing the summaries at the top of search results, Google disadvantages the publishers' original content. "New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered," a Google spokesperson said in response to the complaint.

Explained - Why Did Rolling Stone's Parent Company Sue Google?

While Google has previously claimed that the open web is rapidly declining, it seems like the tech giant is actively contributing to this decline based on the details of the Penske Media Corporation Lawsuit. What's particularly striking is Google's own admission, through its research scientist Marc Najork, that direct answers to user queries reduce referral traffic. This suggests that the tech giant is well aware of the impact its AI services have on publishers, yet it continues to expand these offerings. The lawsuit also highlights how Google's monopoly position creates a coercive dynamic: publishers feel compelled to allow their content to be used for AI training and overviews because opting out could harm their search rankings. This scenario not only erodes the economic model of journalism, but also reduces reliable sources of information for both the average consumer and for the AI products that Google is building. As publishers lose revenue from reduced traffic, they may cut back on reporting staff and quality journalism. Fewer resources mean that news organisations will produce less original, fact-checked content. Ironically, this degradation of the information ecosystem undermines the very foundation that Google's AI systems depend on for training data and accurate responses. Penske Media Corporation (PMC), the parent company of publications like Rolling Stone, Billboard Media, and Variety Media, has filed a lawsuit against Google over its AI overviews. The lawsuit alleges that because of Google's monopoly in the search services industry, it coerces online publishers to supply content that it then republishes without permission through the overviews. In doing so, the corporation alleges that Google is unfairly competing for attention in violation of antitrust laws in the US. The company explains that this is a threat to publishers like the PMC because they depend on Google referrals for a large portion of their revenue. Whether it is advertising or paid subscriptions, PMC needs users to actually visit its sites to make money. The mass media corporation adds that in the last few years, Google has begun asking publishers to provide their content for purposes beyond just search indexing. These include AI overviews that summarise publisher content, training the large language models (LLMs) used to generate the overviews, and extracting key portions of publisher content in featured snippets, including in the question and answer format that show up prominently on the search results page. Classifying these developments as Google's foray into publishing, PMC argues that they lead to lower click-through rates for the original information sources. Search engines store data from publishers in a database called a search index. This database contains copies of publisher content, along with pointers to the location of that content on the web. PMC explains that search engines generate results using algorithms that parse through content within a search index and find which content is most relevant to user queries. The quality of a search engine's results depends upon the scope of its search index and the quality of its relevance algorithms. With regard to Google, publishers contribute to the company's search index by letting the Googlebot crawl their sites. The tech giant, in turn, promises publishers search traffic for contributing high-quality data to the Google search index, PMC explains. PMC explains that Google uses its monopoly to coerce publishers to often supply content for competing purposes as a condition of search referrals. It alleges that this counts as unlawful reciprocal dealing that harms competition. Discussing the US District Court for the District of Columbia's verdict, which ruled that Google was a monopoly in the search market, PMC says that the company has monopolised other markets as well. This includes control over online distribution in search results for online publishers. "But for the exercise of its monopoly power to tie crawling for these substitutive purposes to crawling for search and high placement on the SERP [search engine result page], Google would pay publishers like PMC separately for the right to republish and train and ground LLMs with their content," the company explains. They argue that, given Google's monopoly, even if the company does offer publishers a way to opt out of AI Overviews and featured snippets, publishers would be afraid of doing so because it will deprecate their search results ranking. "So long as other online publishers know that they can artificially elevate their own search results by permitting Google to use their content for Republishing, GAI Training, and RAG, there will be a race to the bottom whereby virtually all publishers opt in, even though the only beneficiary in the end is Google," PMC explains. Google's strategy -- to address user queries through AI Overviews -- along with its access to control over online content distribution, creates a barrier to entry for new search market entrants. Any such entrant would have to replicate the full stack of Google services to effectively compete, PMC explains. It also ultimately restricts output in the online publishing market where Google competes against web publishers. Google's transition to content publisher happened in two phases, PMC explains. In the first phase, the company launched Google News. While it initially started as a service that would redirect users to news content, it eventually included headlines, images and short news snippets. By 2012, the company began to port Google news content into its general search as well as through the knowledge panel which contained rich text answers to different user queries. For example, if a user asks when is George Washington's birthday, the knowledge panel will give them the answer on the search results page itself instead of redirecting to another site. And later on, the company started including a section called 'People Also Ask', which addressed frequent follow-up questions users have had. Furthermore, in response to an EU directive, Google began allowing publishers to block parts of their content from showing up as featured snippets on the search results page. However, this also blocked snippets from showing up as a publisher's content preview on search results. Meanwhile in the second phase, Google expanded on its republishing activities through the use of generative AI. While other AI players are paying for at least some of the publisher content, Google is leveraging its monopoly to avoid the cost of acquiring such content, PMC says. It argues that this monopoly gives Google "an unfair commercial advantage over new entrants in order to extend and entrench Google's General Search Services monopoly in the potentially competitive new age of AI-assisted search". Going into the specifics of Google's search generative experience (which includes AI Overviews), the publishing company notes that AI Overviews do contain links to the content it paraphrases once a user expands it. However, a user who is satisfied with the information in the Overview, would never bother to look at the links. PMC further explains that in March this year, the company expanded its AI services to AI Mode. This service directly addresses user queries with no search results. The lawsuit document gives specific examples of PMC content that Google has paraphrased in line with its AI Overviews and AI Mode. "The top of the SERP no longer presents the most relevant links to publishers that have allowed Google to crawl and copy the contents of their sites in exchange for Search Referral Traffic. Instead, pride of place goes to a machine-made essay consisting of multiple paragraphs purporting to provide the information that a user is searching for generated by an AI model from the very same publisher content that the user otherwise might have visited to learn the answer," PMC explains, arguing that this marks Google's transition from a search engine to an answer engine. PMC alleges that Google's abuse of its monopoly is not just limited to AI Overviews. The tech giant has been intentionally vague about the datasets it used to train the LLMs underlying its AI assistant Gemini and AI Overviews. However, third-party research suggests that the company relied heavily on PMC content in model training. The publishing company explains that its news sites make up a large part of the C4 database, which is part of Google's Model training data. The lawsuit document notes that Google allowed publishers to choose whether it could use their content for improving AI models back in September 2023. However, the tech giant later clarified that if a publisher opted out, it would only prevent their content from being used for model improvement, not from being used for model training in the first place. As per the lawsuit, a Google DeepMind research scientist admitted in 2023 that direct answers to user queries reduce referral traffic. In this presentation about generative information retrieval, the scientist mentioned that this would put pressure on publishers to develop alternative revenue streams. "Google itself recently admitted in a briefing to the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia that 'today, the open web is already in rapid decline'," PMC notes. While Google has since tried to retract the statement, claiming that it was discussing open web advertising rather than the open web in general, PMC argues that the two are interrelated. "Open web display advertising depends on the open web traffic; the decline of one is intrinsically linked to the decline of the other. Google is driving that decline, by siphoning referral traffic with AI Overviews," it explains. PMC contends that if the court allows Google to continue its anti-competitive practices, it would destroy the business model that supports independent journalism.

Rolling Stone parent Penske sues Google for ripping off articles in...

The parent company of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood 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.

Rolling Stone, Billboard owner Penske sues Google over AI overviews

(Reuters) -The owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety sued Google on Friday, alleging the technology giant's AI summaries use its journalism without consent and reduce traffic to its websites. The lawsuit by Penske Media in federal court in Washington, D.C., marks the first time a major U.S. publisher has taken Alphabet-owned Google to court over the AI-generated summaries that now appear on top of its search results. News organizations have for months said the new features, including Google's "AI Overviews," siphon traffic away from their sites, eroding advertising and subscription revenue. Penske, a family-owned media conglomerate led by Jay Penske and whose content attracts 120 million online visitors a month, said Google only includes publishers' websites in its search results if it can also use their articles in AI summaries. Without the leverage, Google would have to pay publishers for the right to republish their work or use it to train its AI systems, the company said in the lawsuit. It added Google was able to impose such terms due to its search dominance, pointing to a federal court's finding last year that the tech giant held a near 90% share of the U.S. search market. "We have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity - all of which is threatened by Google's current actions," Penske said. It alleged that about 20% of Google searches that link to its sites now show AI Overviews, a share it expects to rise, and added that its affiliate revenue has fallen by more than a third from its peak by the end of 2024 as search traffic declined. Online education company Chegg also sued Google in February, alleging that the search giant's AI-generated overviews were eroding demand for original content and undermining publishers' ability to compete. Responding to Penske's lawsuit, Google said on Saturday that AI overviews offer a better experience to users and send traffic to a wider variety of websites. "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. A judge handed the company a rare antitrust win earlier this month by ruling that it will not have to sell its Chrome browser as part of efforts to open up competition in search. The move disappointed some publishers and industry bodies, including the News/Media Alliance which has said the decision left publishers without the ability to opt out of AI overviews. "All of the elements being negotiated with every other AI company doesn't apply to Google because they have the market power to not engage in those healthy practices," Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, a trade group representing more than 2,200 U.S.-based publishers, told Reuters on Friday. "When you have the massive scale and market power that Google has, you are not obligated to abide by the same norms. That is the problem." Coffey was referring to AI licensing deals firms such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI have been signing with the likes of News Corp, Financial Times and The Atlantic. Google, whose Gemini chatbot competes with ChatGPT, has been slower to sign such deals. (Reporting by Aditya Soni, additional reprting by Rhea Rose Abraham and Nilutpal Timsina in BengaluruEditing by Shri Navaratnam)

Google faces lawsuit from big publisher over AI summaries: Check details

The lawsuit also claims that since Google rolled out AI Overviews, PMC has seen a sharp drop in clicks from search. Google is facing a new lawsuit from Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which owns well-known publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe and Artforum. The company accuses Google of using publishers' content without proper permission to power AI-generated summaries in search results. PMC argues that Google is using its dominant position in search to force publishers into a deal they never agreed to. The lawsuit claims that while publishers have long allowed Google to index their websites in return for traffic, the company is now also demanding access to use that content for AI summaries that often answer users' questions directly without sending them to publisher sites. Also read: How to make viral Bollywood like vintage saree photo using Google AI: Step-by-step guide with prompts "As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC's best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth," said Penske Media CEO Jay Penske, according to TechCrunch. "Furthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity -- all of which is threatened by Google's current actions." PMC says the only way to stop Google from using its material in this way would be to remove itself from Google search entirely, something that would be "devastating." The lawsuit also claims that since Google rolled out AI Overviews, PMC has seen a sharp drop in clicks from search, which reduces its advertising, subscription, and affiliate revenue. Also read: Apple iPhone 16 Plus price drops by over Rs 10,500 on Amazon: Check deal details here Google has denied the claims."Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites," spokesperson Jose Castaneda said. "We will defend against these meritless claims." This lawsuit is the first of its kind against Google and its parent company Alphabet. Although other publishers and authors have already taken legal action against other AI firms for similar copyright concerns.