Google Faces Antitrust Lawsuit in the EU Over Its AI Summaries.

A group known as the Alliance of Independent Publishers has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission regarding Google's artificial intelligence (AI) overviews. The accusation claims that Google is "misappropriating web content for its AI summaries in Google Search, causing and continuing to cause significant harm to publishers, including those in the news sector, resulting in loss of traffic, readers, and revenue."

Furthermore, it is emphasized that unless they are willing to completely disappear from Google's search results, publishers "do not have the option to opt out" of having their material included in these AI-generated summaries. Since Google began adding AI-generated summaries at the top of some search results just over a year ago, this feature has continued to expand, to the point of causing significant traffic declines for news publishers.

For its part, Google has argued that "new AI experiences in Search allow people to ask even more questions, creating new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered." The company also challenged the validity of claims about web traffic, stating that these are often based on incomplete data and that "sites may experience increases and decreases in traffic for various reasons."