Judge Amit Mehta tosses Chegg, Penske AI Overviews suits

Publishers let Google’s crawler copy their pages because they expect search traffic back. That expectation is not a deal Google can be sued over, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, throwing out two antitrust suits over AI Overviews, the AI-written summaries Google puts at the top of its search results.

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of Washington, D.C., dismissed every claim brought by education company Chegg and by Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard. One 41-page opinion covers both cases, Chegg v. Google (No. 25-cv-543) and Penske Media v. Google (No. 25-cv-3192). No federal claim survived, and he declined to hear the state-law claims rather than rule on them.

“Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an ‘expectation’ that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free,” Mehta wrote. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.” (p. 20)

What the publishers claimed

Chegg sued in February 2025 and Penske, joined by nine of its brands, in September 2025. Both amended after Google’s first motions to dismiss. Mehta heard both cases together on Aug. 25.

Their core theory: Google uses its search monopoly to force a trade. Publishers get search traffic only if they also hand over content, free, for snippets, for training Google’s AI models and for retrieval-augmented generation, the technique that feeds live web pages to a model as it writes an answer.

Opting out, they said, is no real choice. Blocking Google’s crawler drops a site from search. A control Google offers, Google-Extended, stops some AI uses but, they alleged, not base-model training or AI answers in search (p. 10). Chegg cited its database of 135 million question-and-answer solutions. Penske said it reaches more than 120 million monthly U.S. visitors.

Why each claim failed

No deal, no reciprocal dealing. The main claims said Google illegally conditions traffic on free content, under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. They “fail to get out of the starting gate,” Mehta wrote (p. 19). The publishers alleged no offer, no terms, no commitments and no communications with Google.

Publishers, he wrote, “keep their content open to crawling because doing so serves their own independent interest in search traffic, not because they struck any bargain with Google” (p. 22). Their zero price reflected “voluntarily acceding to cost-free crawling” (p. 22). Their theory would mean “Google therefore would have agreements with billions of web content publishers” (p. 23).

AI Overviews is part of search. Penske alone claimed Google illegally ties AI Overviews to search. Mehta assumed, without deciding, that the stricter per se rule Penske asked for applied, and still dismissed the claim. Penske’s own claim that users stop at the summary instead of clicking through shows “the same use case: providing answers to users’ search queries,” he wrote (p. 28). He noted Penske’s acknowledgment that rival engines, such as DuckDuckGo, also show AI summaries.

Wrong market for standing. On monopoly maintenance, the publishers’ losses, in subscriptions and in pay for AI use of their content, fall outside the general search market, so they lack antitrust standing (pp. 29-31). They “make no allegations about market share at all,” he wrote (p. 32). His earlier findings in the government’s case put Google at 89.2% of general search queries by 2020.

Markets too loose. Penske’s “online publishing” market, covering all text online, is “implausibly overbroad” (p. 37). Chegg’s educational-publishing market is “hopelessly vague” (p. 39). Without a plausible market, the attempted monopolization claims and the related monopoly-leveraging claims failed.

State claims not decided. With the federal claims gone, Mehta declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the California unjust-enrichment claims and dismissed them on that basis (pp. 40-41). He did not rule on their merits. The opinion does not say whether they may be refiled in state court.

Both sides of the opinion

Mehta’s ruling turned on what the publishers pleaded. “The court does not treat Plaintiffs’ alleged harms lightly,” he wrote. Nor is it “unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in,” including for creators “whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation” (p. 25). Any gap in antitrust law, he wrote, quoting an earlier case, “is an issue for Congress [or regulators] to consider.”

Google had argued that what the publishers described as coercion was “a lawful refusal to deal on Plaintiffs’ preferred terms,” as the opinion summarizes it (p. 18).

Google, Chegg and Penske Media had not commented publicly on the ruling as of Thursday afternoon. Jason Kint, chief executive of publisher trade group Digital Content Next, said in a statement reported by Press Gazette that “someone with authority has to address what is happening.”

The judge’s earlier rulings

Mehta also presided over the Justice Department’s search monopoly case against Google; these were separate, private suits. The opinion relies on his March 20 dismissal of a similar suit by news publisher Helena World Chronicle, including its reasoning that AI Overviews is not a separate product from search.

The ruling does not touch copyright. No copyright claim was before the court.

What publishers should know

On this reasoning, leaving a site open to Googlebot is a publisher’s own choice, not a contract. The publishers pointed to such deals elsewhere: Chegg has signed content licenses with two technology companies, and The New York Times licensed content to Amazon for AI training, according to the complaints (p. 11).

An antitrust suit like these would need pleaded facts the judge found missing: real terms or dealings with Google, market share numbers, and a market a court can measure.

What’s next

• Appeal: The Penske order says, “This is a final, appealable order.” The opinion says such an order accompanies it.
• Refiling: The Penske order grants Google’s motion “without prejudice.” Neither it nor the opinion grants leave to amend or sets a deadline. Chegg’s separate order was not on the public court archive as of Thursday afternoon; its docket entry says only that the motion was granted.
• Other suits: Penske has a separate antitrust suit against Google over advertising technology in Manhattan federal court, filed Jan. 12. This ruling does not decide it.

— Simone Adler