Google faces EU antitrust complaint over AI overviews

A coalition of independent publishers has lodged an antitrust complaint with the European Commission, accusing Alphabet’s Google of abusing its dominant market position in online search through its AI Overviews feature.

The complaint, submitted on June 30 by the Independent Publishers Alliance and supported by the Movement for an Open Web and Foxglove Legal, seeks interim measures to prevent “irreparable harm” to media outlets. It argues that Google’s AI-generated summaries—prominently displayed above regular search results—are siphoning off web traffic, damaging readership and eroding revenue for publishers.

According to the filing, 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 asserts that publishers cannot opt out of having their content used by Google’s AI models—or for inclusion in AI Overviews—without also losing visibility in general search results. 

According to a report by Reuters, a Google spokesperson defended the feature, emphasising that AI Overviews drive “billions of daily clicks to websites” and “enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered". The spokesperson added that traffic trends fluctuate due to “seasonal demand, interests of users, and regular algorithmic updates to Search”.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has also received a similar complaint, and a parallel antitrust lawsuit was filed in the United States by an ed‑tech firm alleging comparable harm to publishers. 

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