By Mike Scarcella
WASHINGTON, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Google has asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit by the publisher of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety magazines that accuses the tech giant of eroding traffic to media companies' websites by adding AI-generated summaries to search results.
In a filing on Monday in Washington’s federal district court, Google and its parent Alphabet GOOGL.O called Penske Media Corp’s (PMC) lawsuit “legally defective in every way.”
Penske sued last year, claiming Google broke antitrust law by forcing publishers to allow AI overviews of their content if they want to remain indexed in Google search. Online education company Chegg is separately suing Google over its AI overviews.
Google said its AI overviews are not a separate product from its search engine and that users can still directly access the publishers' pages through its search results.
Google and Penske did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
PMC said in its lawsuit that it relies heavily on Google search referrals to drive traffic and revenue that help to fund content across more than 25 print and digital brands.
The publisher said that in a competitive market Google would pay publishers for republishing their work or using their content to train its AI systems.
Google countered that it has no obligation to index publishers’ content on their preferred terms. Publishers can block indexing entirely, the filing said, and Google does not make any referral traffic guarantees for indexed sites.
“In PMC’s preferred world, Google Search must be frozen in time, requiring users to speculatively visit websites like PMC’s to access their desired information — if it is found there at all,” Google told the court.
Google separately faces a pair of antitrust lawsuits by the U.S. government over the company’s search and advertising practices. Media publishers including PMC and others also are suing over Google’s advertising business.
The case is Penske Media Corp et al v. Google and Alphabet, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, No. 1:25-cv-03192-APM.
For plaintiffs: Ian Crosby, Davida Brook and Geng Chen of Susman Godfrey
For defendants: Sonal Mehta and David Gringer of WilmerHale
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(Reporting by Mike Scarcella)
((Email: mike.scarcella@thomsonreuters.com; Phone: 202-985-8228.))
