Google faces antitrust complaint from EU publishers over AI Overviews

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Google is facing yet another antitrust complaint, this time a group of independent publishers from the EU have accused the search engine of harming them. The lawsuit targets Google's AI Overviews.

Bloggers and web masters have been accusing Google, ChatGPT, Copilot and other AI services of stealing traffic from websites for a long time. It's peculiar algorithm changes has ended in the death of many blogs. It's not just them, over the past few years, many users have complained about how Google's search engine quality has dropped, and that it shows many irrelevant results, or often promotes poorly written content over content-rich publishers or original articles.

Google AI Overviews seems to be making things worse. These Gemini-powered AI-generated summaries appear at the top of the search results page, to provide information relevant to the user's query. However, by doing so, it pushes the usual links further down the web page. Google started including ads in AI Overviews in May 2024.

So, while it earns revenue from searches, publishers are facing an even bigger challenge. Reuters reports that a nonprofit group called The Independent Publishers Alliance have complained to the European Commission alleging that Google is abusing its dominant position in online search. The Movement for an Open Web, comprising digital advertisers and publishers, and British non-profit Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company, have also signed the complaint.

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