Alphabet’s Google is under fresh regulatory scrutiny in the European Union, following a formal antitrust complaint from a group of independent publishers, as per a Reuters report.
The group alleges that the company’s AI-generated search summaries are harming their businesses.
According to a complaint document dated June 30, the group has also requested the European Commission to impose interim measures to prevent what they call a serious blow to competition and access to independent journalism.
The complaint has also been backed by two additional groups: the Movement for an Open Web — a coalition of digital advertisers and publishers — and the UK-based nonprofit Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company, which advocates for tech accountability.
Google’s new troubles in the EU
At the center of the complaint are Google’s “AI Overviews,” the company’s AI-generated responses that appear above traditional search results.
Rolled out in over 100 countries, these summaries aim to provide users with direct answers to queries, often without needing to click through to external websites.
Google began including advertisements in these overviews starting May.
The Independent Publishers Alliance, the group behind the complaint, alleges that these AI Overviews exploit publisher content to create summaries without appropriate consent or compensation, and in doing so, divert user traffic away from the original sources.
“Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership, and revenue loss,” the complaint stated.
The group further claims that Google’s positioning of its AI summaries at the top of search results unfairly favors its own product over publishers’ original content.
According to the complaint, publishers are unable to opt out of having their content used for AI model training or for the generation of summaries without also being excluded from Google’s general search listings — a scenario the Alliance says amounts to an abuse of market dominance.
“Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google’s AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google’s general search results page,” the group alleged.
Google responds to the complaint
In response, Google defended its practices, emphasising the broader value that Search provides to the digital ecosystem.
“New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered,” a Google spokesperson was quoted in the report.
The company added that it sends billions of clicks to websites each day.
Google also pushed back against what it called incomplete data used by critics to claim that AI Overviews are diverting traffic.
“The reality is that sites can gain and lose traffic for a variety of reasons, including seasonal demand, interests of users, and regular algorithmic updates to Search,” the spokesperson told the news agency.
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