Federal judge dismisses Chegg and Penske antitrust suits over Google's AI Overviews
Judge Amit P. Mehta granted Google's motions to dismiss two antitrust suits brought by Chegg and Penske Media Corporation on September 30, 2026. The publishers argued that Google forces sites to hand over content for snippets, AI training, and AI Overviews as the price of appearing in search. The court held that the complaints did not plausibly plead an agreement, separate products, antitrust standing, or a defined market. If you run a site that depends on Google traffic, the ruling leaves your options where they were: let Google crawl, or leave its index.
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Judge dismisses antitrust lawsuits over Google’s AI OverviewsThe Verge AI · Original published September 30, 2026
A federal court in Washington has thrown out two lawsuits that tried to use antitrust law against the way Google reuses publisher content in search. One 41-page opinion covers both cases. It does not say the publishers were unharmed. It says the Sherman Act, the main US antitrust statute, does not reach the harm as the complaints describe it.
Who sued and what they claimed
Chegg, an education technology company, sued Google and its parent Alphabet on February 24, 2025. Penske Media Corporation followed on September 12, 2025, joined by publications it owns, including Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline. Both cases went to Judge Amit P. Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, who heard argument on Google's motions on August 25, 2026.
The complaints describe a bargain that the publishers say Google rewrote. Sites let Google copy their pages and receive search traffic in return. According to the complaints, Google now conditions that traffic on publishers supplying content at no cost for three further uses:
- Republishing excerpts on the results page, for example in featured snippets.
- Training Google's generative AI models.
- Building AI-generated answers, including AI Overviews, through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
Why opting out was the center of the dispute
The publishers say they cannot refuse. According to the complaints, Google Extended, the tool Google offers for limiting how content is used, does not stop the training of base models or the generation of answers in search. The only effective block is to keep Google's crawler off the site, and then the site disappears from Google's results. At this stage the court had to accept those allegations as true. It dismissed the suits anyway.
Why the court rejected each claim
The opinion takes the claims one at a time.
- Reciprocal dealing under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act: the publishers did not plead facts that show an agreement with Google. The complaints describe no offer, no negotiated terms, and no commitment by either side. The court added that the theory would give Google a contract with every site it indexes.
- Tying, a claim only Penske Media brought: the court did not accept that Google Search and AI Overviews are separate products with separate demand. It treated AI Overviews as one part of a single results page.
- Monopolization of general search: the publishers lack antitrust standing. The losses they describe, such as subscription and licensing revenue, arise in a different market from search.
- Attempted monopolization and monopoly leveraging: neither complaint defined a plausible market. The court found Penske Media's online publishing market too broad and Chegg's online educational publishing market too vague.
- Unjust enrichment under California law: with every federal claim dismissed, the court declined to hear the state claims. It did not rule on their merits.
What the court said about the publishers' position
Judge Mehta wrote that the court is not unsympathetic to publishers, or to the journalists, educators, and other creators whose content Google reuses without payment. He also wrote that antitrust statutes cannot stand in for a legislature when the economic effects of a new technology need rules. Any gap in the law, the opinion says, is a matter for Congress or regulators.
The ruling follows an earlier one from the same court. On March 20, 2026, in Helena World Chronicle v. Google, the court rejected similar claims from news publishers. The opinion says Chegg and Penske Media offered no persuasive reason to change course.
What happens next
The order in the Penske Media case dismisses the amended complaint without prejudice, and it states that it is a final, appealable order. The docket in the Chegg case records the same grant of Google's motion. The order document in that case was not available in the public archive when this article was checked on October 1, 2026. Whether the plaintiffs will appeal or file new complaints is not known.
„But an expectation is not an agreement.“
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