{"id":145113,"date":"2025-09-15T14:20:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T14:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/145113\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T14:20:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T14:20:11","slug":"rolling-stone-owner-penske-media-sues-google-over-ai-summaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/145113\/","title":{"rendered":"Rolling Stone owner Penske Media sues Google over AI summaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google faces a new lawsuit accusing the company of illegally using news publishers\u2019 content to create AI summaries that damage their business.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit comes from Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which owns industry publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum. While Penske\u2019s suit is the first to target Google and its parent company Alphabet over showing AI-generated summaries in search, both publishers<\/a> and authors<\/a> have sued other AI companies over related copyright concerns. Google also is also facing an antitrust complaint<\/a> over AI Overviews in Europe.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC\u2019s best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth,\u201d said Penske Media CEO Jay Penske in a statement. \u201cFurthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media\u202fand preserve its integrity \u2014 all of which is threatened by Google\u2019s current actions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since launching its AI Overviews last year, Google has been criticized for threatening the business models<\/a> of the same publishers it relies on to provide the content needed to create accurate AI summaries and answers.<\/p>\n

The new lawsuit goes farther by accusing Google of continuing to \u201cwield its monopoly to coerce PMC into permitting Google to republish PMC\u2019s content in AI Overviews\u201d and to use that content to train its AI models.<\/p>\n

Google spokesperson Jos\u00e9 Casta\u00f1eda said in a statement that AI Overviews make Google search \u201cmore helpful\u201d and create \u201cnew opportunities for content to be discovered.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,\u201d Casta\u00f1eda said. \u201cWe will defend against these meritless claims.\u201d<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The lawsuit argues that while Penske Media allows Google to crawl its websites in an \u201cexchange of access for traffic\u201d that is \u201cthe fundamental bargain that supports the production of content for the open commercial Web,\u201d Google has recently \u201cbegun to tie its participation in this bargain to another transaction to which PMC and other publishers do not willingly consent.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a condition of indexing publisher content for search, Google now requires publishers to also supply that content for other uses that cannibalize or preempt search referrals,\u201d the lawsuit claims, adding that the only way for Penske to opt out would be to remove itself from Google search entirely, which would be \u201cdevastating.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lawsuit also claims that Penske has seen \u201csignificant declines in clicks from Google searches since Google started rolling out AI Overviews.\u201d That means less ad revenue for the publisher, and it also threatens subscription and affiliate revenue, the company says: \u201cThese revenue streams rely on people actually visiting PMC sites.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while Google has pushed back against complaints that AI Overviews reduce traffic to publishers, the lawsuit says, \u201cGoogle has offered no credible competing information regarding search referral traffic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Penske\u2019s suit comes after Google seemingly dodged an antitrust bullet \u2014 while a federal judge had ruled the company acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, the judge did not to order the company to break up its businesses<\/a> (for example by selling Chrome), due in part to an increasing competition in AI.<\/p>\n

This post has been updated with a statement from Jay Penske.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google faces a new lawsuit accusing the company of illegally using news publishers\u2019 content to create AI summaries…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,3986,254,255,64,63,113,98396,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-145113","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-alphabet","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-au","13":"tag-australia","14":"tag-google","15":"tag-penske-media","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}