Google faces its first big lawsuit for AI summaries, from one of many media companies it’s eclipsing
With most of America’s major news sites seeing large drops in readership, even the tech giant itself admits the web is in “rapid decline.”
While Google just avoided a breakup in its federal monopoly case earlier this month, it’s not out of the woods yet. Now, the tech giant’s dominance is under scrutiny for how people are looking stuff up online in 2025.
Over the weekend, it was reported that Penske Media Corporation, the owner of publications like Rolling Stone and Variety, filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of illegally using its journalism to power AI Overviews. This marks the first time that the search titan has been sued by a major US publisher over the feature.
Click downtick
Since being introduced back in May 2024, anyone that’s used Google will have, even unwittingly, used AI summaries — the brief synopses that pop up under queries with a compiled response (of varying accuracy) derived from multiple sources.
However, as the chatbot has all but eliminated the need for search users to click on links, it’s made a significant dent in web traffic directed to news sources, which most sites have relied on for revenue for years.
Looking at Similarweb data cited by Press Gazette for the top 50 English-language news sites globally, that impact is stark.
Only three websites saw their visits increase in July from the same month a year earlier (newsletter platform Substack being a notable outlier), with a massive 46 news sites seeing their web traffic decrease. Even some of the most visited news publications in the world — including CNN, The New York Times, and the BBC, which averaged ~775 million site visits in that month alone — are seeing big declines in clicks.
Indeed, AI is transforming how we use the internet at an alarming rate. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of The Atlantic, said, “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine.” Even the tech giant itself recently said in a court filing that the open web is in “rapid decline.”
