A federal judge this week dismissed antitrust lawsuits that the education company Chegg and the publisher Penske Media filed against Google last year, ruling that the company’s A.I. search features do not violate antitrust law even as they cut traffic to other websites.
The suits, filed in 2025 and dismissed by Judge Amit Mehta of the Federal District Court, took aim at products like A.I. Overviews, the generated answers that now appear above Google’s search results. Chegg, an education and learning platform, said Google had illegally scraped its instructional content so that its Gemini models could effectively recreate it, draining the site’s traffic. Penske, whose publications include Rolling Stone and Variety, said its traffic had also fallen, and argued it was unfair that sites indexed for ordinary search had their content harvested for A.I. answers with no way to opt out. Google asked the court to throw out both cases earlier this year.
The judge was not persuaded. Because Google had no formal arrangement with either company, he wrote, antitrust law does not apply.
“Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an ‘expectation’ that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free,” Judge Mehta wrote. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.”
The ruling is a loss for publishers who have watched their referral traffic fall as Google answers more queries on its own pages, and it closes off one legal route for recovering that audience.
Judge Mehta is no stranger to Google’s search business. He also presided over the Justice Department’s long-running antitrust case against the company, in which he found that Google had violated the law, though the government ultimately won lighter penalties than it had sought. In that case, the illegal conduct involved contracts; in this one, he ruled, there were none.