Google wins on AI summaries: for the judge, an expectation of traffic is not a contract

On September 30, 2026, federal judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the motions of Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. and dismissed two antitrust lawsuits over AI Overviews. The plaintiffs were Chegg, an edtech platform, with a complaint filed on February 24, 2025, and Penske Media, publisher of Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline among others, which followed on September 12, 2025 with a 101-page complaint filed by fifteen group companies. A single 41-page memorandum opinion covers both dockets (CourtListener). Several outlets date the decision to October 1: that is the date of their articles; the filing came the day before.

The plaintiffs' argument, as reported by Forbes and other press accounts, was that Google used its dominant position in search to get, for free, the content it draws on for its AI-generated summaries, leaving publishers only one way out: disappearing from search results altogether. The judge answered that the filings contain no agreement in which Google committed to deliver a set amount of traffic in exchange for content. “Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an 'expectation' that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free. But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works,” reads the opinion as quoted by TheWrap and Forbes. Again according to press accounts, Mehta also found that AI Overviews and Google Search are not separate products in terms of consumer demand, a point that weighs on the tying claim. Press summaries list five groups of rejected claims — reciprocal dealing, tying, unlawful monopoly maintenance, attempted monopolization and leveraging, and unjust enrichment — and according to Forbes the judge declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the unjust enrichment claim under California law. That list comes from press summaries, not from a check against the text of the opinion.

One point remains open, and it is not a procedural detail: TheWrap writes that the dismissal is without prejudice, meaning the suits could be refiled; Forbes writes with prejudice, meaning a final, appealable decision. The text of the opinion and the order could not be accessed, so the point remains unresolved. As long as it does, there is no telling apart two very different scenarios: a closed door where the only road left is an appeal, or a complaint to be rewritten better, with a real contract to show. No appeal has been announced so far, and Penske, Chegg and Google did not immediately respond to TheWrap's requests for comment.

This is the first U.S. ruling on the merits in a publishers' antitrust suit against AI summaries, and it comes from the same judge who presided over the Justice Department's search case against Google. It matters on this side of the Atlantic too, where publishers — Italian ones included, since the traffic drop caused by AI Overviews has been brought before national and European authorities — have raised the same problem: it binds no European or Italian authority, but it is a precedent that enters the debate. What stays with me is the tone of the opinion: the judge wrote of being “not unsympathetic” to the publishers, and that the court must apply the law as written, not as someone believes it should be. In other words: the problem exists, but it does not take the shape of an antitrust violation. If lost traffic is to be compensated, that is for those who write the laws to decide, not those who apply them.

— Olya