Federal court dismisses publisher antitrust suits against Google over AI Overviews

Google just won a round in the fight over who gets paid when AI summarizes the internet. On September 30, 2026, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought by Chegg Inc. and Penske Media Corp. over Google’s AI Overviews feature. What the court decided US District Judge Amit P. Mehta handled both cases. He concluded the lawsuits lacked a valid basis under antitrust law. The publishers’ core argument went like this. Google, they claimed, pushes publishers to hand over content for free AI-generated summaries, and refusing could cost them visibility in Google Search. Judge Mehta was not persuaded by the legal theory behind that grievance. In his view, the plaintiffs had only described an “expectation” of getting search traffic in exchange for making their content crawlable at no charge. They had not shown an actual agreement. “An expectation is not an agreement.” The judge did acknowledge that publishers face real difficulties. But he stressed that antitrust law cannot fix the economic fallout of innovation without a legislative framework to work from. The two cases at a glance Chegg, the education technology company, filed first. Chegg Inc. v. Google LLC, ...