Google accused by Rolling Stone for artificial intelligence summaries: 'kills clicks and publishers'

Artificial intelligence is again under indictment for copyright infringement. From the birth of large language models (LLM) to today, there have been numerous lawsuits brought by publishers against generative AI giants, accused of using articles and books to train their systems. From the New York Times to other large publishing groups, the list is long. The latest Big Tech to end up in the crosshairs is Google, accused of illicitly using publishers' content to feed AI Overviews, the summaries that appear at the top of search results. Content that, according to publishers, is damaging their business.Artificial intelligence is again under indictment for copyright infringement. From the birth of large language models (LLM) to today, there have been numerous lawsuits brought by publishers against generative AI giants, accused of using articles and books to train their systems. From the New York Times to other large publishing groups, the list is long. The latest Big Tech to end up in the crosshairs is Google, accused of illicitly using publishers' content to feed AI Overviews, the summaries that appear at the top of search results. Content that, according to publishers, is damaging their business.

Filing the lawsuit is Penske Media Corporation (PMC), owner of publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe and Artforum. It is the first legal action to directly affect Google and its parent company Alphabet for the use of artificial intelligence-generated summaries in search results.

PMC accuses Google of exploiting its dominant position to force the publisher to allow the republication of content within AI Overviews, using that material also to train its own models. In practice, the lawsuit claims, publishers are confronted with blackmail: either accept that content is used by Google or give up indexing in search results, with 'devastating' consequences for their online visibility. This is a direct consequence of Google's summary Ai, which drastically reduces the incentive to click on original articles, 'penalising traffic to the sites and generating illicit profits from journalists' work'.

The complaint points out that PMC has already experienced 'a significant drop in clicks from Google since AI-based overviews were implemented'. The numbers would speak: around 20 per cent of Google searches that refer to PMC's sites now show AI Overviews, while the publisher's affiliate revenues have dropped by more than a third by the end of 2024.

A trend that does not only involve PMCs: several independent reports claim that an increasing number of searches end up without clicks to external sources, because the user finds the answer directly in the snippet or overview. A recent study by Ahrefs on 300,000 keywords shows that AI Overviews reduce click-through rates by 34.5 per cent for top-ranked sites, with some sectors such as fashion, travel and cooking experiencing significant drops in traffic of up to 70 per cent.