Chegg and Penske Media went to court after Google’s AI-powered search features began answering users’ questions directly on the results page, reducing the referrals that publishers had long treated as the bargain for making their material searchable. The companies argued that Google used its market power to force sites into supplying content for AI Overviews or risk losing visibility in ordinary search.¹

On Wednesday, US District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed both antitrust cases. His ruling turned on the absence of a formal agreement: publishers may have expected search traffic in return for free access to their content, but that expectation was not a contract Google had violated. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.”²

That conclusion is especially notable because Mehta previously found Google had violated antitrust law in the Justice Department’s separate search-monopoly case. Here, however, he found that Chegg and Penske had not established the kind of unlawful conduct required to sustain their claims. The court, he said, could not use antitrust rules as a substitute for legislation governing the economic upheaval of new technology.¹

The decision does not dismiss publishers’ underlying predicament. Mehta said the court was not “unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in,” including consequences for journalists, educators and creators whose work is repurposed without compensation.² Publishers point to steep traffic losses as AI answers increasingly keep users inside Google’s products.

For now, Google has avoided a major US legal setback. Publishers are left seeking a political fix, while overseas regulators may prove more receptive: the UK has ordered an AI-search opt-out, and the European Commission is weighing related questions. Google, meanwhile, has begun a pilot paying roughly 100 publishers for contributions to AI products—an acknowledgment that the traffic bargain at the heart of the dispute is under strain.²