Google is transforming nearly all its services with artificial intelligence, and Search is no exception. On the Search, the company’s most visible experiment is AI Overviews, which generate instant summaries at the top of search results. But these summaries have now landed Google in fresh legal trouble. Penske Media Corporation which is the parent company of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter has filed a lawsuit. The lawsuit argues that the AI-powered feature takes off traffic away from original publishers and cuts into their affiliate revenue.
According to the complaint, AI Overviews push direct links further down the results page, discouraging users from visiting source websites. Instead, readers get the answer in Google’s own words, reducing incentives to click through. Penske alleges these AI summaries have directly contributed to a measurable drop in site visits and, by extension, advertising and affiliate earnings. The lawsuit also highlights a lack of choice for publishers, claiming that they are effectively forced into feeding content into Google’s AI system or risk disappearing from search visibility altogether.
Responding to the concerns at an AI summit in New York, Markham Erickson, Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, offered a defence of the company’s push on AI Overviews. In a statement to Verge, Erickson argued that AI Search is evolving and users preferences are also changing. Erickson said that the Search audiences are no longer satisfied with simple factual answers and a list of links. Instead, they are gravitating towards contextual answers and summaries that provide quick understanding at a glance. And hence are more drawn to the AI summaries.
“We want a healthy ecosystem. The 10 blue links serve the ecosystem very well, and it was a simple value proposition. We’re not going to abandon that model But user preferences, and what users want, is also changing. So, instead of factual answers and 10 blue links, they’re increasingly wanting contextual answers and summaries,” said Erickson. “We want to be able to provide that, too, while at the same time, driving people back to content, valuable content, on the Internet.”
However, the lawsuit and more reports do highlight that a new system in Google Search powered by AI is denting publisher traffic. In fact, earlier this year, the News/Media Alliance also criticised Google’s new AI feature, calling it a move that deprives publishers of both traffic and revenue, and labelled it as “the definition of theft.”
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