The parent company of Rolling Stone, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard are suing Google for what they claim is unfair treatment of its journalism in the search giant’s AI Overviews which borrows its content and captures ad clicks.
The complaint, filed in Washington, D.C. district court, contends that PMC media sites’ AI Overviews — machine‑generated summaries located at the very top of search results pages — scrape and repurpose its publications’ work without consent while limiting the motivation for users to click through to the actual sources.
What the lawsuit claims
PMC argues Google has effectively leveraged its reporting to enhance brief, authoritative‑sounding answers that appear above traditional blue links and capture the user’s attention—undermining the motivation to visit publisher sites. The company says nearly one in five search results currently includes an AI Overview that mentions or cites PMC reporting, and it has seen measurable drops in both traffic and revenue.
The lawsuit also takes aim at the lack of meaningful consent. Publishers need Google to crawl them to be found by searchers — a basic trade that used to lead to clicks. The PMC claims there is no practical, granular way to participate in Search while excluding content from AI Overviews short of turning off visibility altogether. Google, in other words, has made indexing dependent on participation in a product that directly competes with publishers for attention, the complaint argues.
The leadership of PMC frames the case as a defense of professional journalism, with an obligation to protect original reporting and its business model. The filing seeks relief that would limit how Google is allowed to use publisher content in AI Overviews unless it has obtained a license or is authorized already according to publisher terms.
Google defenses and the click‑through discussion
Google denies that the AI Overviews coerce your behavior, instead arguing they assist you and increase content discovery for creators through additional searches as well as by providing above-the-fold links to go deeper below their automatically generated summaries. Publisher lawsuits aimed at Overviews are meritless, according to a company spokesperson, and the feature ultimately opens up more opportunities for sites to be discovered.
Independent data paints a more complex picture. A study from the Pew Research Center found that users were about half as likely to click on a result when an AI Overview was displayed, and only a tiny fraction clicked through on sources cited in the summary. Google has pushed back on that study’s methodology in comments reported by The Register, insisting its internal metrics display benefits to publishers.
The dispute mirrors a yearslong “zero‑click” debate in search. Doctors had earlier examined and declined to test him for the virus, despite his high fever, rigors and chest X-ray showing signs of pneumonia. AI Overviews, by design, send more answers directly to the page — which can also drive up the stakes for news organizations reliant on referral traffic to support businesses built around advertising, subscriptions and sponsorships.
Why publishers view it as an existential threat
Google is the biggest single source of external traffic to many newsrooms. Audience analytics firms like Parse. ly and Chartbeat has always had search as a leading visit driver across the board. If summaries capture user intent at the top of the funnel, fewer clicks make it down to the outlets that invest in original reporting — and the economics of beats, bureaus and investigative work get harder to rationalize.
Publishers also share concerns over attribution quality and context.
And even when sources are attributed, compressed summaries can lose nuance, misrepresent findings and merge the work of multiple outlets. AI Overviews were criticized earlier for providing factually inaccurate answers, and, while Google has dialed back some triggers and tightened guardrails, the potential of authoritative‑sounding mistakes is the predominant concern among journalism brands.
A deepening legal fight over AI and content
PMC’s move adds to the stack of lawsuits testing how far AI companies can take publisher material. Edtech company Chegg has alleged Google is using its content to provide similar summaries. Dow Jones, News Corp’s business-news unit, and the New York Post have sued Perplexity over wholesale copying claims. The New York Times has filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft based on their use of its archives to train models and generate text.
Together, these cases pose the question of whether summarization by generative systems is fair use or needs licenses, and if platforms can generate some quasi‑answer in substitute for a click without remunerating those who provide the work. The results might reset the norms that have prevailed for two decades regarding search and news distribution.
What to watch
The question going forward will be whether the courts force a clear opt‑out for AI Overviews that doesn’t penalize search visibility and whether platform/publisher licensing is established as the norm for generative summaries.
Any ruling that restricts Overviews — or demands payments — could have ripple effects across the wider ecosystem of AI search products.
At the highest level, however, the fight is a straightforward conflict: search engines want to provide more answers on the results page itself, while publishers need users to travel from their own sites. How the law seeks to balance those incentives will set the stage for the next chapter of both search and the business of news.