The Independent Publishers Alliance has lodged an antitrust complaint with the European Commission against Google, accusing the company of abusing its dominant position through the use of AI-generated content summaries in its search results. According to the complaint, Google’s AI Overviews make unauthorized use of publishers’ content, resulting in significant financial and operational harm to numerous publishers—particularly news outlets suffering lost readership, reduced site traffic, and declining revenues.
The complaint highlights that publishers currently have no practical option to prevent their web content from being incorporated into these AI-generated summaries, unless they choose to completely remove themselves from Google’s search results—a choice that would likely cause even greater damage to their visibility and revenue streams.
This legal challenge comes just over a year after Google first introduced AI-powered summaries at the top of select search results. Initially subject to criticism for generating inaccurate and misleading answers, Google’s AI-generated summaries have steadily expanded in scope and prominence. Publishers say this trend is directly linked to a marked decline in user traffic to their websites, raising serious concerns about Google’s market power and the sustainability of the news publishing industry in Europe.
Responding to these accusations, Google’s representatives stated that the new AI features enhance search capabilities by allowing users to ask a wider range of questions, in turn providing publishers and other businesses fresh avenues for content discovery. Google contends that complaints regarding drops in website traffic often rely on fragmented or insufficient data, emphasizing that website traffic fluctuations have multiple potential causes unrelated to the company’s AI technologies.
