Penske Media Corporation, which owns Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, and The Hollywood Reporter, has filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of using its "AI Overviews" feature, which the plaintiff claims is reducing traffic to their sites and negatively impacting profits. The Verge reports.
"AI Overviews" are automatically generated by artificial intelligence and appear at the top of Google search results. The lawsuit states that users are less likely to click through to original articles when they see a summary of the article directly on the search page. This, Penske Media claims, has led to a significant drop in traffic and revenue, including a drop in affiliate link revenue by more than a third by 2025.
The company indicates that it is faced with a choice: either prohibit Google from indexing its content, which will effectively remove it from search results and further reduce traffic, or continue to provide materials used to train Google's algorithms, which, according to the plaintiff, is harmful to their business.
Google, in a comment to the Wall Street Journal, stated that thanks to "AI Overviews," users are finding search more useful and using it more often.
Penske Media is the first major U.S. media publisher to file a lawsuit against Google over the issue. Earlier, a similar lawsuit was filed against Google by education company Chegg, which also claimed that attendance and revenue were reduced due to the technology.
Similar lawsuits are occurring in the AI industry as a whole. In 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using news stories without compensation. Anthropic recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion in a class-action lawsuit over the use of copyrighted works in its chatbot Claude, but the court later rejected the settlement.