Google faces EU antitrust complaint over AI Overviews

A group known as the Independent Publishers Alliance has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission over Google’s AI Overviews, according to Reuters.

The complaint accuses Google of “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.”

It also says that unless they’re willing to disappear from Google search results entirely, publishers “do not have the option to opt out” of their material being used in AI summaries.

It’s been a little over a year since Google began adding AI-generated summaries at the top of some web search results, and despite some early answers that were spectacularly off-base, the feature continues to expand, to the point where it’s reportedly causing major traffic declines for news publishers.

Google told Reuters that “new AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered.” The company also argued that claims about web traffic are often based on incomplete data, and that “sites can gain and lose traffic for a variety of reasons.”