Google is facing an EU antitrust complaint from a group of independent publishers over its AI Overviews. These AI-generated summaries appear at the top of Google’s search results, above regular links to websites, and are shown in more than 100 countries. The publishers claim this is hurting their businesses by reducing traffic to their sites and cutting into their revenue.
The complaint, dated June 30, sent to the European Commission by the Independent Publishers Alliance, alleges Google is abusing its power in online search. The group argues that Google’s AI Overviews use content from news and other websites without permission, and place it in a way that takes attention away from the original sources, reports Reuters.
“Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss,” the document stated.
Also read: Google Veo 3 is now available in India: Here’s how you can use it
The publishers also say they can’t stop Google from using their content to train its AI or create these summaries unless they fully remove themselves from appearing in Google search results.”Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google’s AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google’s general search results page,” the complaint said.
Also read: Meta and TikTok can be sued over teen’s death linked to social media use: Here’s what happened
Google, however, defends its AI Overviews, saying they are helpful to users and still drive a lot of traffic to websites. “New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered,” a Google spokesperson was quoted in the report.
This isn’t the first complaint of its kind. Similar concerns have been raised in the UK and US lawsuits, all pointing to fears that AI-generated answers are harming original content creators.