Google is facing a new lawsuit that accuses the company of illegally using news publisher to create AI summaries that hurt their business.
The lawsuit comes from Penske Media (PMC), which holds industry publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, deadline, atmosphere and artforum. While Penske’s costume is the first goal of Google and its parent company alphabet for the emergence of AI in search, both publishers and writers have sued other AI companies about intellectual rights concerns.
Since began the AI reviews last year, Google has been criticized for threatening the business models of the same publishers based on the provision of the content needed to create expensive AI summaries and answers.
The new treatment goes farther, accusing Google of continuing to “handle its monopoly to force PMC to allow Google to republish the contents of PMC to AI reviews” and use this content to train AI models.
Google spokesman José Castañeda said in a statement that AI’s reviews are searching for a Google “more useful” and creating “new opportunities to discover content”.
“Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to web sites and AI reviews send traffic to a larger variety of sites,” Castañeda said. “We will defend these remarkable claims.”
The lawsuit argues that while Penske allows Google to detect its websites in a “circulation access access” that is “the fundamental agreement that supports the production of content for the Open Commercial Web”, Google “began linking its participation in this deal in another transaction in which PMC and others are published”.
TechCrunch event
Francisco
|
27-29 October 2025
“As a prerequisite for indexing the content of the publisher to search, Google now requires publishers to also provide this content for other uses that can be cannibal or prevent search references,” the treatment claims, adding that the only way to leave Penske would be to leave Google Search.
The lawsuit also claims that Penske has seen “significant reductions in Google searches since Google started unfolding AI offenses”. This means fewer advertising revenue for the publisher and also threatens revenue from subscriptions and subsidiaries, Penske says: “These revenue flows are based on people actually visitor PMC locations. ”
And while Google has pushed behind complaints that AI reviews are reducing publishers, the lawsuit says: “Google did not provide reliable competitive information on search reference.”
Penske’s suit comes after Google seemingly avoids an antitrust sphere – while a federal judge had ruled that the company had illegally acted to maintain a monopoly on the electronic search, the judge was not ordered by the company to dismantle its businesses (for example).
