Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which owns several major news outlets, has filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of using journalistic material without their consent. PMC claims that AI reviews in search are taking away traffic from the media and jeopardizing advertising and subscription revenues.
Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which owns several major news outlets, has filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of using journalistic material without their consent. PMC claims that AI reviews in search are taking away traffic from the media and jeopardizing advertising and subscription revenues.
According to TechCrunch, PMC believes that Google is abusing its monopoly position and forcing publishers to provide content to generate AI answers, depriving them of traffic. The company emphasizes that journalists and editorial offices invest significant resources in creating materials, but Google intercepts users at the search stage, preventing them from going to source sites.
CEO Jay Penske said the company «has a duty to protect its journalists and the future of digital media» because Google’s current actions threaten the funding model for quality content. The lawsuit also states that since the launch of AI Overviews, search traffic to Penske Media’s sites has decreased significantly, negatively impacting both advertising revenue and subscription and affiliate programs.
PMC argues that Google effectively ties publishers' participation in the search index to forced consent to use their content in other products. The option to abandon this model entirely would mean exclusion from search, which is disastrous for media.
Google responded by saying that AI reviews make search «more useful» and even help discover new sites. The company emphasizes that it «drives billions of clicks to publishers every day» and rejects the accusations as baseless.
The dispute comes against a broader global backdrop: Google is already facing charges in the EU for abusing its dominance in search, and in the US the company avoided a business break-up after an antitrust case. At the same time, a growing number of media outlets and authors are suing major AI players for using their data to train models and generate answers without explicit permission.
Recall that dev.ua previously wrote that the use of Google AI for news search and summaries causes a significant drop in traffic on news publishers' websites, which threatens their financial situation and the quality of journalism.
