Federal Judge Dismisses Antitrust Suits Over Google's AI Search

US District Judge Amit Mehta has dismissed the antitrust lawsuits that Chegg and Penske Media filed against Google over its AI search products, ruling that the company's conduct does not violate antitrust law. The decision, published on Documentcloud, is a significant setback for publishers who have watched referral traffic fall as Google's AI Overviews answer user queries directly on the results page.

The cases were filed in 2025, and Google moved to dismiss them earlier this year. Mehta's ruling ends — at least for now — the most prominent legal attempt to frame AI-generated search summaries as an antitrust problem rather than a business dispute.

What the plaintiffs claimed

Chegg, an education and learning platform, accused Google of illegally scraping its educational content. According to the lawsuit, that scraping allowed Google's Gemini models to essentially recreate Chegg's content inside search results, reducing the traffic that would otherwise have flowed to the site. Chegg's core argument was that Google took the substance of its work, repackaged it through AI, and cut off the visitors who made Chegg's business viable.

Penske Media, which owns publications including Rolling Stone and Variety, filed a similar case alleging lost traffic. The publisher's complaint focused on a structural asymmetry in how Google operates: sites that allow themselves to be indexed for organic search also have their content harvested for AI answers, and they have no way to opt out of the second use while remaining in the first. A publisher that wants organic search traffic must, in effect, also feed Google's AI features — whether it wants to or not.

That framing aimed at the heart of the AI search debate. Publishers have argued that AI Overviews invert the bargain that built the web: instead of pointing users to sources, the search engine consumes the sources and serves its own summary, keeping the user on Google's page.

Why the judge was not persuaded

Mehta rejected the plaintiffs' central premise: that Google owes websites anything beyond what it has explicitly agreed to. He found that the implicit arrangement between Google and publishers — index your content, receive search traffic in return — carries no legal weight.

"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."

That sentence does a lot of work. It draws a line between a business model built on an assumption and a legally enforceable contract. Publishers made their content freely crawlable in exchange for traffic; the traffic then became the foundation of their businesses. Mehta's ruling holds that this arrangement, however foundational to the modern web economy, never amounted to a commitment Google was bound to honor.

The judge also addressed the specific mechanics of the complaints. Indexing for search, in his view, is not a promise of distribution. If Google's products evolve — from a list of blue links to AI-generated answers — publishers have no antitrust claim merely because the evolution hollows out their referral traffic.

Why the ruling matters

The stakes extend well beyond Chegg and Penske. AI Overviews and comparable features from other search providers have measurably reduced click-through to publisher sites across the industry, and publishers have struggled to find a legal theory that fits the harm. Contract and copyright law have offered narrow paths. Antitrust looked, to some, like the strongest option: a dominant search company using its gatekeeping position to absorb the value of the content it indexes.

Mehta's dismissal undercuts that theory at the district court level. If a general search engine's use of freely available content is "simply how a general search engine works," then publishers who want to challenge AI summarization may need to look elsewhere — to copyright claims over training and reproduction, to legislative fixes, or to licensing negotiations pursued from a weaker position.

For Chegg specifically, the case was existential framing as much as litigation. The company had already tied its declining fortunes to AI, and the lawsuit was its most public attempt to hold Google accountable for that decline. The dismissal leaves the company without the judicial remedy it sought.

For Google, the ruling is a clean win at a moment when the company faces intense scrutiny of its search dominance. The judge's framing — that no enforceable agreement exists between Google and the sites it indexes — gives the company a durable defense against a category of claims that other publishers might have brought.

What comes next

The plaintiffs can appeal, and the dismissal leaves the underlying questions unresolved: whether AI-generated answers built on indexed content constitute unfair competition, and whether publishers will ever obtain a genuine opt-out that separates organic indexing from AI harvesting. Those questions now shift back to other courts, other legal theories, and regulators. Until one of them produces a different answer, the exchange Mehta described — free content in, whatever traffic Google chooses to send out — remains the operative rule of the web's largest gateway.