Colliding Models; Publishers sue Google for AI overviews

Penske Media, owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, has become the first major U.S. publisher to sue Google over its AI Overviews, alleging the feature uses its journalism without consent while cutting into traffic and revenue (according to Reuters).

Penske claims Google ties search visibility to allowing articles in AI summaries, a practice it argues exploits Google’s 90% U.S. search dominance. The company says affiliate revenue has already fallen by more than a third as traffic declines.

Google counters that AI Overviews improve user experience and expand discovery.

Here at TheMarketAI.com, we’ve noticed the shift firsthand: AI crawlers now outnumber human readers by a wide margin. At the same time, reports suggest a huge portion of AI’s training data comes from user-generated platforms like Reddit raising real questions about who benefits and who pays.

TheMarketAI Take

This lawsuit underscores a much larger collision: the search engine model vs. the AI summary model. It's another AIrony: the more people use AI the less incentive there is for publishers and people to create quality content and in turn there will be less quality content for AI to train on and provide quality responses.

For decades, search engines drove traffic back to publishers. Now, AI summaries threaten to keep users on-platform, while still pulling from publisher content.