Penske Media sues Google over AI summaries, citing threat to journalism
Rolling Stone and Billboard owner accuses tech giant of using content without consent, diverting traffic and ad revenue.
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Owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety sued Google alleging the technology giant's AI summaries use its journalism without consent.
Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety, has filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of using its journalism in AI-generated overviews without permission and harming its business in the process.
The lawsuit, filed September 12 in federal court in Washington, D.C., is the first by a major U.S. publisher against Google’s “AI Overviews,” which display machine-generated summaries at the top of search results.
Led by Jay Penske, the family-owned media conglomerate draws 120 million monthly online visitors. The company argued that Google conditions publishers’ visibility in search on allowing their content to be repurposed in AI summaries, a practice it says amounts to leveraging monopoly power.
Google reportedly controls nearly 90% of the U.S. search market.
Penske, according to Reuters, said around 20% of Google searches that link to its outlets now display AI overviews, a share expected to rise, and reported that affiliate revenue has fallen by more than a third since 2024 as search referrals declined.
Google, however, defended the tool. “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,” spokesperson Jose Castaneda reportedly said.
AI Overviews, Google's instant, AI-generated search summaries, have sparked major concerns for publishers. They fear a "zero-click" problem, where users bypass their websites, leading to estimated traffic drops of 20% to 60%. Publishing platform Raptive projects this could translate to up to $2 billion in annual industry ad revenue losses, with smaller websites already experiencing over half their traffic vanish since AI Overviews launched.
