Penske AI Overviews lawsuit dismissed because no "formal bargain" was struck

A US judge has dismissed Penske Media Corporation's antitrust suit against Google over the traffic and revenue it lost to AI Overviews, finding no "formal bargain" ever existed between the publishers and Google. Judge Amit Mehta accepted that the harm is real, saying the court does "not treat Plaintiffs' alleged harms lightly", but ruled the Sherman Act claim failed because Penske "voluntarily acceded" to zero-price crawling and could not show mutual assent to any transaction. Penske, which owns Variety, Hollywood Reporter and Rolling Stone, said search traffic to affiliate-link content "dropped dramatically", cutting organic affiliate revenue by more than a third from its peak to the end of 2024. Mehta was blunt on the core problem: "an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works." The same reasoning sank a parallel case from education firm Chegg. Digital Content Next chief Jason Kint responded that the real-world problem is unchanged: "Google has an adjudicated illegal monopoly in search and is now swallowing up all of the journalism of humanity to power its AI products, while sending less and less traffic and value back to the publishers who create it."

The crux

publishers cannot reach Google through antitrust law for AI Overviews, because a search engine that indexes content for free does not owe its sources a traffic bargain, however devastating the revenue loss.

Sell-side read

the legal route to compensation for AI Overviews is now effectively closed in the US, which raises the stakes on the commercial and licensing route and on owning direct traffic.

Watch

whether a state or legislative remedy (rather than private antitrust) becomes the next vehicle, given Kint's "someone with authority has to address this" framing.