Publish or perish: Rolling Stone owner sues Google over AI summaries feature

Penske Media Corporation, publisher of Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, and The Hollywood Reporter, has filed a federal lawsuit against Google over its AI Summaries feature. The suit alleges that Google is abusing its search monopoly to republish content without permission in AI-generated answers, violating U.S. antitrust laws and threatening the traditional web publishing model.

What you should know: PMC claims Google’s AI Summaries are significantly damaging publisher revenue and web traffic through unfair competition.

• The lawsuit accuses Google of “coercing online publishers like PMC to supply content that Google republishes without permission in AI-generated answers.”
• PMC reports that 20% of Google search results linking to its websites now include AI overviews, contributing to a decline in affiliate revenue of more than one-third by the end of 2024 compared to its peak.
• The company’s lawyers argue that “Google’s conduct threatens to leave the public with an increasingly unrecognizable Internet experience, in which users never leave Google’s walled garden and receive only synthetic, error-ridden answers.”

The big picture: This lawsuit represents the first major U.S. publisher to take legal action against Google’s AI Summaries in federal court, escalating industry tensions over AI’s impact on digital publishing.

• Industry data from Digital Content Next, a nonprofit representing major publishers, found median year-over-year referral traffic from Google Search was down 10% in May and June, with some publishers reporting click-through declines as steep as 25%.
• Google has faced similar regulatory challenges internationally, including a complaint filed by the Independent Publishers Alliance in the European Union in June.

What Google is saying: The company maintains that AI Summaries can actually benefit publishers despite overall traffic concerns.

• “AI Summaries can actually increase ‘high-quality clicks,’ where users stick around to browse the website, even if overall traffic falls,” Google argues.
• Liz Reid, VP and Head of Google Search, dismissed critical reports as “often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the rollout of AI features in Search.”

Why this matters: The lawsuit could set a precedent for how AI companies can legally use publisher content, potentially reshaping the relationship between search engines and content creators in the AI era.