Penske and Chegg lose their AI Overviews lawsuits against Google

A US federal judge has thrown out the AI Overviews lawsuits that Penske Media and Chegg filed against Google. Judge Amit P. Mehta of the District Court for the District of Columbia signed a 41-page opinion on 30 September. The ruling became public on 1 October.

Penske owns Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline. Chegg runs a homework help service with about 135 million questions and answers. Both said Google uses their pages to write AI answers and then sends fewer readers back to them. Studies have pointed the same way: AI Overviews halve clicks on the top result for many queries.

Mehta says Google never struck a deal with publishers

Both cases rested on a “reciprocal dealing” claim under the Sherman Act. The publishers said Google gives them search traffic only if they also let it use their content in AI Overviews. Mehta found no agreement behind that. “An expectation is not an agreement,” he wrote, as quoted by Press Gazette. Letting Google crawl a site, in his view, is simply how a search engine works.

He also rejected Penske’s “tying” claim. For the court, AI Overviews and classic results are one product, not two. Forbes reported that he found the proposed markets, “online publishing” and “online educational publishing”, too broad. The order is final, so both companies can appeal.

Penske said affiliate revenue fell by more than a third

Penske filed its case in September 2025. It said organic affiliate revenue had dropped by more than a third by the end of 2024. The judge did not deny the damage. According to PPC Land, he noted “the knock-on consequences to journalists, educators, and other online creators”. Those harms alone, he said, do not make an antitrust case.

Jason Kint, who heads the publisher group Digital Content Next, said Google uses its dominance to undermine the open web and the economics of journalism.

Gannett and Daily Mail keep their ad tech case alive

Publishers have not run out of options. On the same day, the ad tech antitrust case brought by Gannett and Daily Mail was allowed to go ahead. Earlier in 2026 a similar AI Overviews suit from smaller newspapers was dismissed. Google is also testing a scheme that pays some publishers for content used in AI features.

For now, Google comes out ahead. It can keep building AI answers from publisher pages without a court telling it to pay. Penske, Chegg and other publishers lose their main US legal route and are left with an appeal, the ad tech case and talks over Google’s paid pilot.