US District Judge Amit Mehta has dismissed antitrust lawsuits filed by Chegg and Penske Media against Google, ruling that the tech giant's conduct does not violate antitrust law. The decision marks a setback for publishers who have argued that AI search products like Google's AI Overviews are driving down traffic to their sites.
The cases were filed in 2025, and Google requested dismissal earlier this year. Chegg, an education and learning platform, alleged that Google illegally scraped its educational content. The company claimed this allowed Gemini models to recreate that material, which in turn reduced traffic to Chegg's site. Penske Media, which owns publications including Rolling Stone and Variety, filed a similar suit alleging lost traffic. The publisher argued it was unfair for sites indexed for organic search to have their content harvested for AI answers without an opt-out option.
Judge Mehta rejected these arguments, noting that Google's implicit agreement with websites is not legally relevant. In his ruling, the judge wrote that plaintiffs only pleaded an "expectation" that Google would send them search traffic if they made their content available for free. He clarified that such an expectation is not an agreement, but simply how a general search engine works.