Rolling Stone’s Parent Company, Penske Media, Sues Google Over AI Overviews, Citing Damage to News Publishers

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Penske Media takes Google to court, claiming AI Overviews drain publisher traffic and misuse content!

Penske Media Corporation, the publisher behind Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter, has filed a lawsuit against Google and its parent company, Alphabet. The company alleges that the tech giant’s new AI Overviews feature is devastating the economics of online publishing.

The suit, filed in federal court, argues that Google is unlawfully using its dominance in search to undermine journalism while profiting from publishers’ work.

The complaint is Google’s AI Overviews, a search feature introduced earlier this year that automatically generates short, AI-written summaries at the top of results pages. Penske Media claims these overviews reduce the need for users to click through to the original articles, depriving publishers of valuable traffic that sustains advertising, subscriptions, and affiliate sales. The company says the decline has already led to measurable losses across its portfolio of brands.

Penske also accuses Google of coercive practices, arguing that publishers are effectively forced to allow their content to be ingested for both indexing and training AI models if they wish to remain visible in search.

The lawsuit maintains that the only alternative, blocking Google’s crawlers entirely, would mean disappearing from the world’s most used search engine, an option Penske describes as economically devastating. This, the company asserts, amounts to an abuse of monopoly power.

The filing also claims Google has failed to provide credible data proving its assertions that AI Overviews drive traffic to publishers. Instead, Penske argues, the summaries siphon away readers while giving little in return.

Jay Penske, the company’s CEO, framed the lawsuit as an effort to protect the livelihoods of journalists and preserve the integrity of digital media in an environment increasingly threatened by unlicensed AI use.

Google has pushed back firmly against the allegations. Spokesperson José Castañeda said the company intends to “vigorously defend” itself, calling the claims meritless. Google maintains that AI Overviews make search more helpful by giving users concise information and by highlighting diverse sources that readers can explore further. The company insists the feature supports, rather than undermines, online publishers.

As AI transforms how information is consumed, the case highlights an urgent question: can journalism survive if readers increasingly get their news through AI-generated digests rather than visiting publishers’ sites? The outcome of Penske Media’s lawsuit could determine whether the balance of power in online news shifts even further toward Silicon Valley, or whether publishers can reclaim control of their content in the AI age.