Judge Dismisses Penske Media and Chegg AI Overviews Suits

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought by Penske Media Corporation and education technology company Chegg over Google’s AI Overviews, ruling that the companies had not adequately shown that Google’s practices violated antitrust law. The dismissal was not with prejudice, leaving Penske Media able to refile its case. The lawsuits alleged that Google uses publishers’ and other websites’ content to generate AI summaries in search results, diverting visitors from their sites and harming advertising and subscription revenue. Chegg also alleged that websites were pressured to provide content for the AI feature to remain in Google’s search results. Those claims were allegations in the lawsuits, not findings established by the ruling. Mehta wrote that the plaintiffs had pleaded an expectation of receiving search traffic when making content available to Google, rather than an agreement entitling them to that traffic. He characterized crawling publicly available websites as a normal function of a search engine.