Judge dismisses Chegg and Penske antitrust claims over Google's AI Overviews
US District Judge Amit P. Mehta dismissed antitrust claims by Chegg and Penske Media against Google's AI Overviews in a ruling issued Wednesday, 30 September 2026, writing that "an expectation is not an agreement".
A federal judge has dismissed antitrust lawsuits filed by education-technology company Chegg and Penske Media Corporation (PMC), the parent company of Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline, which had accused Google of driving away web traffic with its AI Overviews search feature, The Verge reported on 1 October 2026, citing an earlier Reuters report. US District Judge Amit P. Mehta issued the ruling on Wednesday, 30 September 2026, which PPC Land reported the following day.
What the ruling found
- Chegg and PMC had alleged Google abused monopoly power by coercing publishers into supplying content for AI Overviews for free, or risking disappearance from search results, diverting traffic and hurting revenue, The Verge reported.
- Mehta rejected the contractual theory behind the claim, writing that publishers never pleaded "any actual agreement whereby Defendants promised to 'sell' Plaintiffs" traffic, according to PPC Land.
- Mehta said publishers had only an expectation, not a right, to traffic: "an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works," The Verge quoted him as writing.
- Mehta, who issued a landmark 2024 antitrust ruling against Google, said the court was not "unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in," but wrote that antitrust rules cannot substitute for a legislative response, per The Verge.
- Digital Content Next chief executive Jason Kint said after the ruling that "Google is using its dominance to fundamentally undermine the open web," PPC Land reported.
Why it matters
The dismissal closes off one legal route publishers had used to seek compensation for traffic lost to AI-generated search summaries, leaving licensing deals, lobbying and competition regulators as the remaining avenues; PPC Land noted publishers are separately pursuing the issue "through the European Commission," which oversees the EU's Digital Markets Act. For publishers in the Caspian region and beyond that depend on Google referral traffic, the ruling signals that, absent a written agreement, courts in the United States are not currently willing to treat reduced search traffic from AI summaries as an antitrust violation.
