A federal judge has thrown out antitrust lawsuits brought by Chegg and Rolling Stone parent company Penske Media Corporation over Google's AI-powered search features, even as the search giant has begun paying a small number of publishers for the content that feeds those same tools. The ruling, reported by The Verge, lands at a moment when publishers and authors alike are still trying to work out what AI search and AI-generated summaries mean for their traffic and their income.
US District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the suits on Wednesday, siding with Google, according to The Verge, which cited earlier reporting by Reuters. Chegg and PMC had filed their lawsuits last year, accusing Google of abusing monopoly power by pressuring publishers to supply content for AI Overviews for free or risk vanishing from search results. Both companies argued this arrangement diverted traffic away from their sites and cut into their revenue.
Mehta, who issued a landmark antitrust ruling against Google in 2024, did not accept that argument this time. "Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an 'expectation' that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free," he wrote, according to The Verge. "But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works."
The judge added that the court was not "unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in," but said antitrust law cannot substitute for a legislative response to the economic impact of what he called "new innovation," The Verge reported.
For authors and publishers who depend on search traffic to sell books, drive newsletter signups or support ad-funded writing, the ruling closes off one legal avenue for challenging how AI search tools use their work. The Verge reported that traffic to news outlets and smaller websites has continued to decline since Google's AI-powered search overhaul took hold, a trend the lawsuits had tried, unsuccessfully, to address through the courts.
At the same time, Google has started paying some publishers directly. The Verge reported that The Information found Google is paying around 100 publishers for their contributions to AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini, as part of a pilot program. The Verge did not report further detail on how publishers were selected for the program, what they are paid, or whether it will expand beyond its current scale.
Taken together, the court ruling and the pilot program point to two different tracks running at once. Courts have so far declined to treat the mechanics of AI-powered search as an antitrust violation, leaving publishers largely without a legal remedy for lost traffic. Separately, Google appears to be testing a direct payment relationship with a limited set of publishers for the same underlying use of their content, which the plaintiffs had argued should have been compensated in the first place.
What it means for writers
For independent authors and small publishers watching this unfold, the lesson from Mehta's ruling is that courts currently view the search-traffic relationship as one of expectation rather than enforceable obligation. That leaves compensation, where it exists, largely up to what companies like Google choose to offer rather than what they can be compelled to pay. The scale and terms of Google's pilot program, and whether it expands to more publishers, remains the detail worth watching next.
Sources
Every quotation and figure in this article is checked against the source reporting linked above before publication. How we report