US District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed antitrust lawsuits from Penske Media Corporation and Chegg on September 30, rejecting their claims that Google's AI Overviews illegally drain their traffic and revenue. The 41-page opinion closes, for now, the most prominent legal attempt to frame Google's AI summaries as an antitrust violation.

The two companies sued separately. Chegg filed in February 2025; Penske, which owns Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, followed in September 2025 together with affiliated publishers. The court heard the cases together in August 2026.

The implied bargain fails

Both plaintiffs argued Google used its search monopoly to force a choice: let Google repurpose their content in AI Overviews, or risk losing visibility in search. The AI summaries answer readers' questions on Google's own page, they said, cutting the clicks that fund their advertising and affiliate businesses.

Penske asked the court to recognize an implied agreement between Google and publishers — an unwritten bargain in which open crawling buys referral traffic. Mehta declined. Accepting that theory, he reasoned, would mean Google holds agreements with billions of websites. He found it more plausible that publishers simply accepted free crawling.

"Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an 'expectation' that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free," Mehta wrote. "But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works."

Tying and market definitions fall too

Penske also accused Google of illegally tying AI Overviews to its search engine. Mehta found the publisher had not plausibly shown the two are separate products under antitrust law. He also noted a tension in Penske's own pleading: if readers satisfied by AI Overviews have less reason to click through, that undercuts the claim of two distinct markets.

The proposed publishing markets failed as well. The court found the companies lacked antitrust standing in general search because they operate downstream of Google, and they had not shown that Google faces a dangerous probability of monopolizing online publishing. Lost referral traffic and ad revenue, Mehta concluded, are not direct antitrust injuries caused by Google.

Mehta said he was "not unsympathetic" to the publishers. Still, he wrote that antitrust law is no substitute for legislators deciding how to handle disruption from new technology. A final, appealable order accompanies the opinion, so the publishers can take the case to a higher court.

The traffic numbers behind the fight

The publishers' concerns rest on hard behavioral data, separate from the courtroom arguments. In a Pew Research Center study of real browsing behavior, users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result on just 8% of those search pages, compared with 15% on pages without a summary. Links inside the summaries themselves drew clicks only 1% of the time.

Google says AI Overviews now reach more than 2.5 billion monthly users. At that scale, even single-digit shifts in click behavior move large sums of advertising money, which explains why media companies and education providers like Chegg — whose business depends heavily on question-and-answer traffic — filed suit at all.

The impact cuts across verticals. Lifestyle and entertainment publishers such as Penske's titles rely on advertising tied to pageviews. Chegg, a homework-help service, depends on subscription conversions from informational queries. Both models suffer when the summary answers the question before the click.

What remains open

The ruling closes one legal route, not all of them. Copyright claims remain available, and publishers including Hachette, Cengage and Elsevier have already sued Google over Gemini training data. Notably, Mehta is the same judge who found in 2024 that Google holds an illegal monopoly in online search — a separate case that continues to shape the remedies debate.

Regulators, not US courts, are delivering the choices publishers asked for. After the UK's competition authority ordered more control for publishers, Google began testing a Search Console toggle that removes a site from AI Overviews and AI Mode while keeping it in regular results. The setting started with a subset of UK site owners ahead of a planned global rollout. It gives publishers a real choice, though a hard one: opting out also surrenders whatever traffic those AI features currently send.

Watch next for an appeal of Mehta's September 30 dismissal, the global expansion of the UK opt-out toggle, and the outcome of the Gemini copyright suits — the three channels now carrying the publishers' case against AI-generated answers.