Google Sued Over AI Summaries Using Content from Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety

Google is under legal fire from the media powerhouse behind Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, and other major outlets, which alleges that the tech giant is illegally using its content to generate AI-powered search summaries. The lawsuit, filed by Penske Media Corporation, claims Google’s AI Overviews republish copyrighted content without permission, undermining site traffic and ad revenue for original publishers.

This is the first lawsuit of its kind to directly challenge Google and its parent company Alphabet over AI-generated summaries in search results. Penske Media argues that Google is leveraging its market dominance to pressure publishers into allowing this content reuse and that the company is also using the material to train AI models without proper licensing.

The suit arrives amid growing legal scrutiny of AI tools that scrape and summarize content from across the web, often without compensation to original creators. Similar copyright concerns have been raised in lawsuits against other AI developers. In Europe, Google is already facing an antitrust complaint tied to the competitive impact of AI Overviews on digital publishers.

Google has pushed back, claiming that AI Overviews improve the search experience and boost visibility for a broader range of websites. A company spokesperson described the lawsuit’s claims as baseless and reiterated that Google Search continues to drive billions of clicks to content publishers daily. The outcome of this case could significantly influence the future of AI content use and copyright enforcement online.