Judge Mehta Tosses Chegg and Penske Antitrust Suits Over Google AI Overviews
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Chegg and Penske Media failed to show Google's AI search summaries illegally starved their sites of traffic.
US District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed two antitrust lawsuits against Google on Wednesday, handing the company a win in the first courtroom test of whether its AI-generated search summaries illegally cut off traffic to outside websites. The suits, brought separately by education company Chegg and Rolling Stone publisher Penske Media Corporation, argued that Google's AI Overviews answer enough queries on their own to keep users from ever clicking through to the sources those answers draw from.
Mehta, who sits on the US District Court for the District of Columbia, sided with Google after finding that the plaintiffs had not made a sufficient case that the search giant's conduct crossed the line into illegal monopolization. Reuters first reported the ruling. The decision lands as publishers, newsrooms and e-commerce operators across the web press the same complaint: that AI summaries are siphoning away the referral traffic their businesses were built on.
Chegg has been among the loudest voices on that front. The homework-help company has blamed a steep decline in its subscriber base and search visibility on Google's expanding use of AI answers, and has argued in court filings and public statements that the feature amounts to Google leveraging its search dominance to compete directly against the sites that supply its results. Penske, whose titles also include Variety and Deadline, filed its own suit on similar grounds.
Google has maintained that AI Overviews are a product improvement, not a weapon, and that users still click through when they find a useful source. The company has pointed to the competitive pressure it faces from AI chat tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, which answer questions without sending users to a traditional results page at all. Mehta's ruling accepts that framing at this stage, though it does not settle the broader legal question of how far a dominant search engine can go in summarizing the open web.
The dismissal is a setback for the growing coalition of media and internet companies trying to use antitrust law to slow the spread of AI-generated answers. It also arrives as Google faces separate, more advanced monopoly cases, including the Justice Department's search and ad-tech matters, where Mehta himself has already ruled that Google illegally maintained its search monopoly. That contrast matters: the same judge who found Google liable in the government's search case concluded that these private plaintiffs had not cleared the bar.
What comes next depends on whether Chegg and Penske appeal or refile with a narrower, better-documented theory of harm. Watch for other publishers to weigh similar claims, and for the discovery record in the DOJ cases to surface evidence about how AI Overviews affect referral traffic. The core factual fight — how much traffic AI answers actually divert, and whether Google intended that outcome — remains unresolved.