Google AI Overview Antitrust Suit Dismissed — "An Expectation Is Not an Agreement"

Penske Media — owner of Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and Variety — filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google's AI Overviews about a year ago, and that suit has now been dismissed, Search Engine Roundtable reported on October 1.

Penske argued that Google required publishers to hand over content for free in exchange for search visibility, then turned around and used that same content to answer user questions directly — eliminating any need to visit the publisher's own site.

Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the case, ruling that the plaintiffs failed to establish an actual agreement. "An expectation is not an agreement," he wrote, finding no negotiated terms, mutual obligations, or meeting of the minds between the parties. Allowing automated crawling, combined with a publisher's expectation of referral traffic, doesn't amount to a legally binding contractual relationship. The judge acknowledged the harm publishers experienced but concluded that how a general search engine ordinarily operates doesn't constitute the kind of coercive bargain that requires a legal remedy.

This ruling is a different animal from the Perplexity copyright lawsuits covered here recently. Those cases argue copyright infringement over scraping content without a license, while Penske's suit against Google argued that using search visibility as leverage to take content was itself an unfair antitrust practice. Both start from the same underlying concern — AI taking publisher content and reusing it — but they attacked it from different legal angles.

Whether this ruling gets appealed isn't known yet. But for publishers weighing a similar suit against Google or other AI search companies, it adds one more precedent saying that merely having allowed content access doesn't itself support an antitrust claim. Copyright cases (like the Perplexity suits) and antitrust cases (like this one) may well keep producing different outcomes going forward.

In Korea

Korean media outlets may share similar concerns about how AI Overviews or generative AI search summarize and present their content. That said, this ruling was reached within the specific framework of U.S. antitrust law — the idea that "allowing crawling isn't itself a contract" — so the same reasoning wouldn't necessarily carry over directly to Korea.