Judge Amit Mehta has dismissed the antitrust lawsuits that Chegg and Penske Media filed against Google over AI Overviews, ending a high-profile legal effort by publishers to hold the search engine liable for traffic losses attributed to AI-generated answers.

The dismissal, reported across multiple news outlets, removes one of the most closely watched legal threats to Google's AI search strategy. Chegg, the education technology company, and Penske Media, the publisher behind titles including Rolling Stone and Variety, had argued that Google's AI Overviews — the AI-generated summaries displayed above traditional search results — unfairly appropriate publishers' content and divert clicks away from source sites.

The ruling arrives as publishers continue to report steep organic traffic declines they attribute to AI Overviews and similar AI answer features. Chegg in particular has stated publicly that AI-powered search answers contributed to sharp deterioration in its business, and the company framed its lawsuit as a test of whether antitrust law can reach a search engine's product design decisions.

Judge Mehta's dismissal leaves those claims without a federal antitrust vehicle, at least in this litigation. The publishers had sought to build on the broader antitrust findings against Google — Mehta himself oversaw the landmark 2024 ruling that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in general search — but the judge determined that the AI Overviews claims did not support an antitrust cause of action on the facts presented.

The decision matters for search professionals on two levels.

First, it signals that courts are unlikely to treat AI Overviews as an antitrust violation in themselves. Google's rollout of AI-generated answers, which expanded across core search results starting in 2024 and broadened further in 2025, has cut click-through rates for informational queries across publishing, education and comparison verticals. Tool providers and independent studies have measured material declines in organic clicks for queries that trigger AI summaries. Those measurement signals, however, are third-party estimates, not Google statements — Google has consistently maintained that AI Overviews send valuable traffic to publishers and that links within AI answers generate engagement.

Second, the dismissal narrows publishers' remaining options. Plaintiffs in similar disputes have pursued other theories — copyright claims against AI training and output, licensing negotiations, and legislative advocacy for content-compensation frameworks. The Chegg and Penske path, arguing that diverting search traffic constitutes exclusionary conduct under antitrust law, has now failed at the dismissal stage before one of the judges most familiar with Google's search monopoly.

For site operators, the practical consequence is unchanged but sharpened: traffic losses tied to AI Overviews will not be remedied through this litigation, and optimization strategies will need to account for AI answers as a permanent feature of the results page. Publishers in education, entertainment and general news — the verticals Chegg and Penske represent — remain among the most exposed, since their content directly answers the informational queries most likely to trigger an AI Overview.

Google, for its part, continues to expand AI Overviews into new query categories and markets, and has introduced ad formats within and around AI-generated answers, deepening the monetization of a results-page layout that publishers say starves them of clicks.

What to watch next: whether Chegg or Penske appeal the dismissal, whether other publishers pursue alternative legal theories such as copyright, and how Google's ongoing AI Overviews expansion affects referral traffic patterns as measured by analytics platforms through the coming quarters.