Rolling Stone owner Penske Media sues Google over AI summaries (techcrunch.com)

Penske Media Corporation (PMC), owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety and other trade outlets, has sued Google and parent Alphabet, alleging the company illegally harvests publisher content to create AI-generated “AI Overviews” that cannibalize search referrals and ad/subscription revenue. The complaint claims Google leverages its search monopoly to coerce publishers into allowing their content to be republished and used to train models as a condition of indexing — forcing publishers to choose between traffic from Google search or opting out entirely. PMC says it has seen “significant declines” in Google-driven clicks since AI Overviews rolled out and accuses Google of offering no credible traffic data to contradict that claim. Google denies the suit, arguing AI Overviews make search more helpful and can drive discovery and traffic. For the AI/ML community this lawsuit foregrounds two intertwined legal and technical battlegrounds: copyright and antitrust. At issue is how search engines use crawled content not just for indexing but as training data and summary generation, potentially disrupting publisher business models that rely on search referrals. If courts limit unlicensed use of content for model training or find coercive tying of services unlawful, companies building summarization features or large-scale models may need clearer licensing frameworks, provenance controls, or algorithmic transparency about data sources and traffic impact. The case is an important test of how existing IP and competition laws will shape responsible data practices for deployed AI search products.