Overreach By AI Overviews? Newly Filed Publishers’ Complaint Points To ‘Significant Harm’

You really don’t need to see others’ research and reports to understand that Google’s launch of AI Overviews has had an effect on clicks.

All you need is your own two eyes, watching Google kick back search results that increasingly show less and less clickable links, with traditional organic results buried further and further down the page.

Or have a quick glance at your own traffic, likely down considerably as search summaries with zero-click results directly address the matters that had once kept you at the top of the search mountain.

As smart publishers evolve their SEO strategies into GEO strategies, some are going even further, standing up en masse and filing an antitrust complaint against the Big Tech titan.

“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,” says The Independent Publishers Alliance’s complaint, filed to the EU Commission. 

According to Reuters’ reporting on the complaint, the UK-based nonprofit coalition asked for an interim measure to stop what it’s calling abuse of its online-search market power. “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,” says the complaint.

PCMag spoke with Rosa Curling, a director at a legal nonprofit that co-signed the complaint, who called AI Overviews an “existential threat” to independent news. “She urged the European Commission and other regulators worldwide to enable publishers to opt out of AI Overviews,” writes PCMag’s Will McCurdy.

For its part, a Google spokesperson told Reuters that search-traffic claims are often based on incomplete data, as sites “can gain and lose traffic for a variety of reasons, including seasonal demand, interests of users, and regular algorithmic updates to Search.” 

While this is far from the first legal step that publishers have brought in the larger AI battle, it looks like it won’t be the last either.