The owner of Rolling Stone magazine is suing Google for illegally using its journalism to create summaries of stories for its search engine.
Penske Media, which also owns the magazines Variety and Billboard, said that by providing users with brief outlines of information, Google had reduced the number of people clicking through to its websites.
Google has been using artificial intelligence to scrape data from publishers’ websites and create versions of their content for what it calls “AI overviews”.
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The summaries allow users to see content on the Google search page, rather than clicking through to another site.
In its lawsuit, Penske said: “We have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity, all of which is threatened by Google’s current actions.”
Jose Castaneda, a spokesman for Google, said the company would “defend against these meritless claims”.
He added: “With AI overviews, people find search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. Every day Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web and AI overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites.”
DMG Media, the owner of brands including MailOnline and Metro, has said AI overviews led to a drop in referrals to its websites of 89 per cent. The publisher told the Competition and Markets Authority that Google’s summaries were “carefully constructed” to ensure “the user has no reason to read any further” than the search page.
The research group Enders Analysis has warned publishers that “search traffic is no longer a given” in the age of artificial intelligence.
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Douglas McCabe, a media analyst, said in a report this year that publishers were losing money as their content was “used but not rewarded”, adding: “Many publishers have used their websites to replicate the article format but the website itself is no longer the primary destination for consumers as it struggles to meet expectations, while AI erodes monetisation.”