Judge dismisses Chegg and Penske AI search antitrust suits as Google's publisher payouts stay tiny

The ruling landed on 1 October. US District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the two suits, filed in 2025, finding that Google's conduct around AI Overviews was not illegal under antitrust law. Ars Technica reported the decision the same evening, and Engadget carried it within the hour, both citing the memorandum opinion in which Mehta wrote: "Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an 'expectation' that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free. But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works."

Both plaintiffs had a commercial theory, not a contractual one. Chegg, the education platform, argued Google scraped its material, fed it into Gemini and then served answers that replaced clicks back to Chegg. Penske Media, owner of Rolling Stone and Variety, argued that sites indexed for organic search were having the same pages harvested for AI answers with no opt-out. Engadget's write-up notes that Mehta found neither company convincingly showed Google was leveraging a search monopoly to force free content or to gain an unfair publishing advantage. That matters because Mehta is the same judge who ruled in 2024 that Google maintained a monopoly in online search.

The court did not pretend the economics were fine.

"The court does not treat Plaintiffs' alleged harms lightly," Mehta wrote, according to Ars Technica. "Nor is it unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in, and the knock-on consequences to journalists, educators, and other online creators whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation."

For publishers, the dismissal closes one route and leaves others open. Mehta's reasoning points to legislation rather than litigation, and Ars Technica notes that US lawmakers have been slow to act on AI and search. Overseas, the picture is different: the European Commission is examining similar questions, and the UK has ordered Google to provide an AI opt-out for sites that want to stay in organic search results.

The money is small, and the spread is enormous

On the same day the judge ruled, German outlet heise reported that Google's pilot scheme paying publishers for content used in AI Overviews covers roughly 100 publishing houses, blogs and websites, according to The Information. The amounts vary wildly. One publisher told The Information it had received about $50,000 to $60,000 so far, which it described as not a significant share of its revenue. A former participant said it had made more than $1 million, a much larger slice of its business. Smaller sites received less than $1,000 in some cases over several months, and for several small and mid-sized operators the payments amounted to less than 0.1 percent of advertising revenue.

Those figures have consequences. Heise reports that the low payouts have reportedly deterred some larger media houses from joining the programme at all, a holdout intended to push Google and other AI vendors toward higher rates. Other publishers treat the pilot as a way to learn which content Google's AI values most, so they can shape strategy around it. Google apparently does not share that signal yet. Participants can track revenue through Google Search Console, according to Digiday, but often do not know how individual amounts are calculated.

Google's historical position was that publishers need not be paid for search visibility because the search engine sends traffic in return. Since AI Overviews began placing generated summaries directly on the results page, that traffic has shrunk. Heise also reports that Google is pressing publishers on AI licensing: those wanting to join a new AI pilot for Google News are expected to grant broad content rights, in some cases as a condition for continuing existing payments.

The company is also testing payments while fighting on other fronts. Ars Technica reported on 30 September that the pilot was not going over well with publishers, and that Google is exploring direct payments for content contributing to AI answers.

Regulatory and legal pressure is not going away. The Federal Reserve and the FDIC published resolution plan feedback letters on 29 September for 15 banking organizations with over $250 billion in assets, a reminder that formal supervisory channels keep moving regardless of the search fight. In the AI security space, NVIDIA published an engineering framework on 21 September arguing that agent permissions must be enforced outside the model's own reasoning, a governance argument that applies to any system repurposing third-party content at scale.

Publishers themselves are hedging. Condé Nast and Hearst were among roughly 300 publishers pressuring Congress to ban bot scraping, according to Mashable SEA, while Digiday reported on 1 October that media buyers are turning "generative engine optimisation" from an experiment into a budget line. The Verge reported on 30 September that Google is testing publisher payments for AI search results; Search Engine Journal put some sites below 0.1 percent of ad revenue the next morning.

None of that changes the legal position set out on 1 October. Mehta's opinion is explicit that antitrust law cannot substitute for legislation just because an outcome feels unfair: "The court is bound to apply the law only as it is written, not how the court or any party believes it ought to be." Google gets its dismissal. Publishers get a sympathetic paragraph and a pilot cheques that, for many, do not cover the traffic they lost.