Publishers are finally standing up to Google. What comes next?
Rolling Stone’s parent company is suing the search giant over AI Overviews, and it could mark a turning point in the fight over content rights and compensation.
Have we finally reached the point where the media is willing to take on Google in its fight for fair compensation in the age of AI? For at least one publisher, the answer is yes: Penske Media has sued the big G over AI Overviews, despite Google still being the most important discovery engine for content on the internet, Penske’s properties included. The lawsuit definitely feels like a turning point, but how big, what’s driving it, and what happens next?
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The gloves are off: Why Penske’s lawsuit against Google changes everything
Media organizations have sued AI companies so many times in the past two years that the act has become routine. When I cover these cases in The Media Copilot, I typically put them in the Chatbox news roundup on Thursdays, adding to the pile of publishers seeking fair payment for the content that AI labs have consumed to train large language models (LLMs). At this point, there are so many lawsuits that they require elaborate infographics to keep track of them.
But Penske Media’s new copyright suit stands apart, and that’s because of who it’s targeting. The publisher of Rolling Stone is taking aim at none other than Google.
In many ways, Google is the ultimate target in the AI arena. Sure, OpenAI’s ChatGPT may have more buzz and broader usage at the moment than Google Gemini, but Google holds a rare dual role: It’s both a cutting-edge AI lab and the gatekeeper of how almost everyone accesses information online today. Taking into account AI Overviews in search, you could argue that no one is putting AI in front of more eyeballs than Google.
That massive reach is now becoming a serious problem for publishers. As more searches result in direct answers instead of a list of links, users are clicking less, and the referral traffic that media companies rely on is drying up. Making things worse, Google uses the same crawler to index content for both traditional search and AI Overviews, meaning publishers can’t opt out of the latter without losing visibility in the former.
The dam finally breaks
Still, few in publishing have dared to challenge Google directly, worried that doing so could erase their already shrinking traffic. When News Corp filed a lawsuit against Perplexity last year, it pointed out how the AI startup had scraped content, built a competing product using AI summaries, and bypassed licensing entirely. But while all those arguments could apply just as easily to Google, no second suit came.
Is Penske Media’s lawsuit about to change that?
