Rolling Stone, Variety owner sues Google over AI overviews

Penske Media Corporation (PMC) – owners of publications such as Rolling Stone, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard – has just filed a lawsuit against Google over one of its most prominent AI features.

According to the complaint filed in federal district court in Washington DC on Sept. 12. PMC is suing Google for using its content without its consent in the search giant’s AI Overviews feature.

AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries that appear at the very top of Google’s search engine results pages. These AI summaries pull from websites and other third-party sources and display the summaries right on Google’s own search pages. News organizations have reported that these AI Overviews have resulted in a loss of traffic, which in turn has hurt advertising and subscription revenue.

PMC’s complaint states that the company has experienced traffic and revenue declines attributed to the roughly 20 percent of Google search results that include an AI Overview and a link to one of the company’s publications.

“As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC’s best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth,” PMC’s founder, chairman, and CEO Jay Penske said in a statement provided to multiple outlets. “Furthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity – all of which is threatened by Google’s current actions.”

The lawsuit also accused Google of forcing publishers into AI Overviews without their consent, as these companies depend on Google’s web crawlers to index their websites on its search engine in exchange for traffic.

Google has already pushed back on the lawsuit, arguing that AI Overviews actually helps publishers.

“With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered,” Google Spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement. “We will defend against these meritless claims.” 

A recent Pew Research Center study aligns with some of PMC’s claims regarding Google’s AI Overviews’ impact to publishers. The study found that Google Search users were half as likely to click on a link if the search results page included an AI Overviews summary. In addition, the study found that only 1 percent of users that were served with AI Overviews clicked on a link to the source material that the summary was derived from. In response to this study, Google told the Register in July that they believe Pew used a “flawed methodology” and disagreed with its findings.

Google as well as other AI companies are facing multiple lawsuits over content issues.

Edutech company Chegg filed a lawsuit against Google earlier this year over its AI summaries. Last October, News Corp’s Dow Jones and New York Postsued Perplexity over its AI “copying” their work. A group of news organizations, including The New York Times, have also taken OpenAI to court over copyright issues.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.