Google Has AI Search Lawsuits From Chegg and Penske Media Dismissed

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta has dismissed the antitrust lawsuits filed by Chegg and Penske Media Corporation against Google over its AI-powered search features. The Verge

The rulings were issued in Washington. The Business Times Both plaintiffs accused Google of abusing monopoly power by forcing publishers to choose between letting their content be used for free in AI Overviews and disappearing from search results. AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries that appear above the usual list of links.

Chegg and Penske Media said Google used its dominance in general search to divert readers away from their sites, which cut their revenue. They argued that in a truly competitive market, Google would have paid them to republish their work or to use it to train its AI systems.

Mehta rejected the coercion claim on contract grounds. He wrote that the publishers had shown only an 'expectation' that Google would send them traffic if they left their content open for free, and that "an expectation is not an agreement but how a general search engine works".

No traffic was promised. Google's system crawls, indexes and ranks content from the open web, meaning it reads public pages, organizes them, and orders them by relevance. Under Mehta's reading, hoping for visits does not create a binding deal, and losing those visits does not count as exclusionary conduct, a legal term for actions that unfairly block competition.

Mehta concluded that Chegg and Penske Media had failed to adequately plead violations of the Sherman Act, the main U.S. antitrust law. Forbes He added that "the court is not unsympathetic to publishers' situation, but antitrust rules cannot replace a legislative decision to address the economic impact of new innovation".

Mehta is the same judge who issued the 2024 antitrust ruling against Google. Penske Media filed its AI Overviews antitrust lawsuit against Google in 2025.

The broader context here is the gap between platform dependence and antitrust injury. Search traffic can feel like basic infrastructure once a business is built around it. The law draws a different line. Mehta separates economic harm, such as lost visits and weaker bargaining power over licensing, from competitive harm, which requires proof that a monopolist kept or extended its position through improper means.

In my view, that line will shape the next round of publisher-platform disputes more than the fate of these two complaints. If AI answers reduce the need to click through, publishers face three hard options. They can negotiate joint licensing deals, they can build direct channels to readers that do not depend on search queries, or they can push for a new law on compensation. Courts have now signaled that the Sherman Act cannot be used as a shortcut around that work.

One point worth flagging for technologists is that the engineering question stays open. How systems retrieve information, summarize it and cite sources still decides how much value flows back to publishers, even if antitrust law does not require a specific design.

Looking further ahead, new distribution bargains look more likely than a return to the old flow of clicks. Generative search, which creates answers by combining many sources, lowers the cost of putting information together. The opportunity is to build discovery and credit for sources into that process from the start, rather than trying to restore the link-based economy that came before.