Google has won dismissal of two lawsuits challenging its use of publishers’ content in AI-powered search, dealing a setback to an antitrust strategy aimed at securing payment and protecting referral traffic.
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta granted Google and parent company Alphabet’s motions to dismiss the amended complaints brought by Penske Media and education technology company Chegg on September 30. A single 41-page memorandum opinion addresses the two separate cases in federal court in Washington.
The ruling resolves the antitrust claims pleaded in these complaints. It does not decide whether copying articles for AI training, retrieving them to generate answers, or producing particular summaries violates copyright.
Penske and Chegg alleged that Google uses its dominance in general search to obtain their content without payment, then repurposes that material in products that compete for their audiences. Their argument centered on publishers’ dependence on Google referrals: blocking access could sacrifice traffic, while allowing access could supply material for answers that reduce the need to visit the original website.
Those are the plaintiffs’ allegations. The court accepted well-pleaded factual allegations as true for purposes of deciding the dismissal motions; it did not conduct a trial establishing the claimed traffic losses or their causes.
A central problem was the proposed exchange of content for traffic. The plaintiffs described a reciprocal-dealing arrangement, but Mehta found that they had not plausibly alleged an actual agreement with Google.
“But an expectation is not an agreement,” he wrote.
The court explained that publishers can permit crawling because they independently want search traffic without having struck a bargain promising referrals in return. Google had argued that no such deal existed and that the complaints instead sought to require it to operate on the publishers’ preferred terms.
Other antitrust theories also failed. The opinion rejected the plaintiffs’ antitrust standing to pursue their general-search monopolization claims and found deficiencies in their claims concerning downstream publishing markets. Penske’s additional tying claim did not plausibly establish that AI Overviews and general search were separate products.
The state-law unjust-enrichment claims received different treatment: after dismissing the federal claims, Mehta declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over them. That is not a ruling rejecting their merits. The opinion states that a final, appealable order accompanies the decision.
For radio and television newsrooms, entertainment publications and independent news websites, the business significance is the difficulty of turning reliance on search referrals into a legally enforceable promise of traffic or compensation under these antitrust theories.
The decision creates no new publishing requirement for those outlets. It also provides no blanket copyright clearance for AI-generated summaries. Copying material for training, retrieving current reporting and reproducing protected expression in an answer raise distinct questions that this ruling does not resolve.
For publishers negotiating AI licenses, the remaining issue is therefore broader than this dismissal: what uses an agreement expressly authorizes, what compensation it provides and what rights the publisher retains. Google’s victory narrows this particular antitrust route; it does not settle the wider dispute over who may use journalism to power AI answers.
Source: September 30 memorandum opinion, Chegg, Inc. v. Google LLC, No. 25-cv-00543, and Penske Media Corporation v. Google LLC, No. 25-cv-03192. General information, not legal advice.