Penske Media Sues Google Over AI Overviews — Publishers vs. Search AI

14Sep 2025 by alex No Comments

Summary

Penske Media Corporation (PMC), owner of Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard and others, has filed a federal lawsuit against Google alleging the company illegally uses PMC content to power its “AI Overviews” in Search. PMC says the feature is “siphoning and discouraging user traffic” to publisher sites and that roughly 20% of Google searches linking to PMC content now include AI Overviews.

Key claims

PMC alleges Google repurposes publisher content to generate AI summaries without permission or compensation, harming referral traffic and affiliate revenue.
PMC says affiliate revenue through 2024 has fallen more than a third from its peak and expects the problem to worsen as AI Overviews expand.
Jay Penske (PMC CEO) said the company must “protect PMC’s best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism… threatened by Google’s current actions.”

Google’s response

Google spokesperson José Castañeda responded that Google will “defend against these meritless claims” and that “AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,” arguing the feature makes Search more helpful.

Legal context

This is the first major U.S. publisher to sue Google specifically over AI-generated search summaries, but it’s part of a broader wave of litigation over AI training/data use and publisher rights. Related disputes include:

Chegg’s earlier legal action over AI using educational content.
The New York Times’ lawsuits against OpenAI over use of news articles to train models.
The Anthropic class-action settlement (reported at $1.5B) related to training on copyrighted works.

Where to read more

What to watch

The case could reshape how search engines present AI-generated summaries and whether publishers must be compensated when their work is repurposed for AI features. We’ll update this post as the lawsuit progresses.

Source links: TechCrunch, Axios. (Original reporting summarized from multiple outlets.)