Google’s AI Overview Faces EU Antitrust Complaint
Independent publishers accuse Google of monopolizing news distribution.
WASHINGTON, July 7, 2025 – The Independent Publishers Alliance filed an antitrust complaint against Google’s AI Overview tool, alleging that it unfairly suppresses independent publishers by prioritizing AI-generated summaries over original content.
The AI Overview, a tool embedded in Google Search and available in more than 100 countries, automatically appears when users conduct a search. Since May, it has incorporated advertisements above the summaries, raising even more concern among independent publishers.
In the June 30 filing, the Independent Publishers Alliance – a London-based nonprofit founded in 2021 – urged the European Union to implement interim measures that would prevent Google from denying independent publishers’ traffic.
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“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 organization stated in the complaint.
The complaint argued that publishers are given no choice but to hand over their content to Google.
“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 complaint stated.
The filing was signed by two other advocacy groups, Movement for an Open Web and Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company, both of which criticized Google’s AI tool.
“In short, AI Overviews are theft from the publishing industry,” Tim Cowen co-founder of Movement for an Open Web stated. “They steal publishers’ content and then use that to steal their traffic before it reaches their site. That’s unfair and a clear breach of copyright principles.”
Rosa Curling Foxglove co-executive director echoed a similar message, stating, “Independent news faces an existential threat: Google’s AI Overviews. That’s why with this complaint, Foxglove and our partners are urging the European Commission, along with other regulators around the world, to take a stand and allow independent journalism to opt out.”
In response, Google denied that AI Overviews were responsible for the decline in viewership among independent publishers, citing that there were numerous reasons for viewership declines not correlated with the AI Overview.
A Google spokesperson defended the AI Overview in an interview with Reuters, stating, “New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered.”
Google has faced similar antitrust complaints in the U.S., where advocacy groups called Google’s AI Overview tool suppressive.
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