Judge tosses Chegg and Penske suits over Google AI Overviews

A federal judge has dismissed lawsuits from publisher Penske Media Corporation and ed tech company Chegg that alleged Google's AI Overviews illegally repackaged their content and pulled readers away, Reuters reports.

Judge Amit Mehta, of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled in a memorandum opinion covering both cases that the companies failed to show Google violated antitrust law. Mehta is the same judge who ruled in 2024 that Google maintained a monopoly in online search services — a fact that makes this dismissal notable: even from the bench that found Google holds monopoly power, the publishers' theory of harm did not hold up.

The stakes are significant for the publishing and education technology sectors. AI-generated search summaries sit between users and the websites that produced the underlying content, and publishers argue this rerouting of attention directly undermines the advertising revenue that funds their work. Chegg in particular has blamed AI search products for a collapse in its business, and the outcome of these cases was being watched as an early test of whether antitrust law can address that pressure.

PMC and Chegg's original lawsuits claimed Google used AI Overviews and its vast index of the web to siphon traffic away from their online advertising businesses, hurting their revenue. Chegg additionally alleged that Google effectively forced websites to offer their content for AI scraping or face exclusion from search results.

Mehta dismissed both claims on multiple grounds. Broadly, he found that neither company convincingly argued Google was leveraging its search monopoly to obtain free material for its AI, or that the company was seeking an unfair advantage in digital publishing.

"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 distinction — between an implied bargain and a legal agreement — sits at the center of the dispute. The publishers' argument rested on the premise that Google sending traffic to their sites constituted a de facto exchange: free content in return for visitors. Mehta rejected that framing. In his view, the dynamic describes how search engines have always operated, not an enforceable arrangement that Google broke when it began answering queries itself.

The ruling does not endorse Google's conduct on the merits. It closes this particular legal avenue. Google still faces the consequences of Mehta's 2024 monopoly ruling, and the relationship between search dominance and AI products remains live terrain for regulators and litigants.

The wider picture is not clear-cut for publishers, either. Google offers a mechanism for publishers to exclude their webpages from being used in AI Overviews, and those pages still appear in traditional search results. That opt-out exists, but it functions as a compromise rather than a solution. As AI Mode and AI Overviews occupy more of the search results page, the space left for clickable links keeps shrinking — which is why many publishers consider the trade unsatisfying regardless of the legal outcome.

Engadget has asked PMC and Chegg to comment on the memorandum opinion.

For content-dependent businesses, the dismissal narrows the path to challenging AI search features through antitrust claims built on lost traffic. The pressure will likely shift toward other legal theories, regulatory action flowing from the monopoly ruling, or commercial negotiation over how AI systems compensate — or fail to compensate — the sources they summarize.