Judge Mehta dismisses Chegg and Penske Media antitrust suits over Google AI Overviews

US District Judge Amit Mehta has dismissed the antitrust lawsuits that Chegg and Penske Media Corporation, the parent company of Rolling Stone, filed against Google over its AI-powered search features. Reuters reported the ruling earlier. In a decision issued Wednesday, Judge Mehta sided with Google, writing that the claims brought by PMC and Chegg do not stand up under antitrust law.

The ruling is a significant setback for publishers who have argued that Google's AI Overviews — the machine-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results — are draining traffic from the websites that produce the underlying content.

Chegg and PMC filed their lawsuits last year. Both companies accused Google of abusing its monopoly power in search. Their central allegation: Google coerces publishers into supplying content for AI Overviews for free, and any publisher that refuses risks disappearing from search results entirely. In effect, the publishers argued, Google takes their work, repackages it in its own interface, and keeps the resulting attention and ad revenue for itself.

The companies also claimed that Google's practices diverted web traffic away from their sites. That traffic is the economic foundation of the publishing business. When a user reads an AI Overview instead of clicking through to the original article, the publisher loses the page view, the advertising impression, and ultimately the revenue that funds the journalism or educational content in the first place.

Judge Mehta was not persuaded. In his Wednesday ruling, he concluded that the publishers' claims fail as a matter of antitrust law. The dismissal removes one of the most prominent legal challenges to Google's AI-era search strategy — at least for now.

The case matters well beyond Chegg and Penske Media. Chegg in particular has been one of the most visible casualties of generative AI's impact on the web economy. The education company built a business on students searching for homework help and paying for structured answers; AI summaries and chatbots have undercut that model by answering many of those questions directly. Penske Media's participation showed that the same argument had spread from edtech to mainstream magazine publishing.

The lawsuits were also a test of whether existing antitrust doctrine can reach a new kind of alleged harm. Traditional antitrust law is built around concepts like monopolization, market foreclosure, and consumer prices. The publishers' theory — that a dominant search engine can extract free content from dependent suppliers and then compete against them using that content — does not map neatly onto those categories. Judge Mehta's ruling suggests that, in his view, it does not map at all.

Notably, Judge Mehta is the same judge who oversaw the broader US antitrust case against Google over its search monopoly. That context gave the Chegg and PMC suits a particular weight: they were filed in the shadow of an ongoing judicial examination of Google's dominance in search.

The dismissal leaves publishers with fewer legal options in the United States, at a moment when the traffic effects of AI Overviews are already visible across the industry. If AI-generated answers keep absorbing the queries that once produced clicks, publishers will have to look elsewhere — to licensing deals, regulatory action, or legislative reform — rather than to the courtroom strategy Chegg and PMC pursued.

For Google, the ruling is a clean win on one front while the company continues to face scrutiny on others. The court filing, published via DocumentCloud, now becomes part of the growing body of case law that will shape how — and whether — antitrust law adapts to AI-mediated distribution of information.