The EU antitrust complaint against Google's AI Overviews marks a significant escalation in the growing tension between Big Tech and independent content creators — particularly news publishers — as artificial intelligence reshapes how people consume information online.
What's at the heart of the complaint?
The Independent Publishers Alliance, supported by Foxglove Legal and Movement for an Open Web, has accused Google of:
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Abusing its market dominance in online search by placing AI Overviews — its generative AI summaries — at the top of search results, thus diverting traffic away from original publisher content.
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Using publisher content without consent to train its large language models and create summaries, without offering publishers a genuine opt-out mechanism that wouldn't penalize their visibility in traditional search results.
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Causing irreparable harm to publishers’ revenue, readership, and reach, and threatening the sustainability of independent journalism.
They are urging the European Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to impose interim measures to pause or limit the deployment of AI Overviews pending full investigation.
Why does this matter?
Google's AI Overviews are a cornerstone of its generative AI integration in Search, rolled out in over 100 countries. These summaries are meant to answer user queries directly, often reducing the need for users to click on links — which has dramatically reduced referral traffic for many publishers.
📉 The core concern: Publishers lose ad revenue and subscriber interest when users get answers from Google’s AI instead of clicking through to their original content.
This is similar to the US lawsuit filed earlier this year by an educational tech firm, which argued that Google is cannibalizing the open web by synthesizing its content and offering it back to users without attribution, context, or compensation.
What Google says:
Google defends its practices by stating:
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It drives billions of clicks to websites daily.
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AI Overviews actually encourage more complex and frequent search queries, potentially increasing content discovery.
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Traffic fluctuations can result from seasonality, shifting user interests, and algorithm updates, not solely from AI integration.
However, Google hasn’t addressed the lack of consent or opt-out for model training and content summarization, which is at the heart of the publishers’ concern.
The Bigger Picture:
This complaint brings together three major global debates:
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AI vs. Journalism: Can AI tools coexist with sustainable independent journalism, or will they erode it?
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Data Usage and Consent: Should tech companies be allowed to scrape and summarize content without permission?
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Antitrust and Dominance: Is Google leveraging its search monopoly to unfairly promote its own AI outputs at the expense of competitors?
If the European Commission or UK CMA moves to enforce interim restrictions, it could set a global precedent for how AI summarization is regulated. It could also force Google to offer compensation, opt-out mechanisms, or ranking parity for affected publishers — similar to Australia's News Media Bargaining Code.
What's next?
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The European Commission has not commented yet, but such cases can trigger formal investigations under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into effect in 2024 and targets gatekeepers like Google.
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A similar complaint is now under review in the UK, where regulators have been increasingly active in scrutinizing AI and Big Tech’s influence on the digital economy.
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Other countries may follow, as pressure builds globally for AI accountability and fair digital markets.
In short, this isn’t just about one feature — it’s a defining battle over the future of online content ownership, revenue sharing, and platform responsibility in the AI age.
