A Judge Says Google Takes Publishers’ Work. He Dismissed Their Case Anyway.

Six weeks ago, Judge Amit Mehta told a courtroom that the way Google uses publishers’ work for its AI answers “all seems really unfair,” as Search Engine Journal reported from the Aug. 25 hearing. On Sept. 30 he threw their cases out anyway.

Mehta, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, granted Google’s motions to dismiss antitrust suits from Penske Media Corp. and Chegg in a 41-page memorandum opinion, Forbes reported, with a final, appealable order attached. Penske, which owns Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter, and Chegg, the education company, had argued that Google’s AI Overviews repackage their content without paying for it and drain the search traffic their ad businesses run on.

The opinion turns on one line, quoted by Search Engine Roundtable and others: “Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an ‘expectation’ that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free. But an expectation is not an agreement.”

Why the theory failed

The publishers’ main claim was “reciprocal dealing”: that Google effectively conditioned search referral traffic on publishers supplying content for AI uses beyond ordinary indexing, as Forbes summarized it. Chegg went further, per Engadget, alleging Google coerced sites into feeding its AI or risk vanishing from results.

That kind of claim under Section 1 of the Sherman Act needs a deal between two parties. Mehta found none. Publishers never bought traffic, and Google never promised to sell any. He wrote that Penske and Chegg “failed to plead any actual agreement whereby Defendants promised to ‘sell’ Plaintiffs any specific amount of traffic,” per the ruling excerpts Search Engine Roundtable published. Tying and attempted-monopolization claims fell too, according to Forbes, and the court declined to hear California unjust-enrichment claims.

Coverage disagrees on whether the dismissal is with or without prejudice; we have not been able to read the opinion itself, so we are not characterizing it either way.

The judge agreed about the harm

This is the part publishers will frame and hang on the wall. The judge wrote that the court “does not treat Plaintiffs’ alleged harms lightly,” and that it is not unsympathetic “to the situation publishers now find themselves in, and the knock-on consequences to journalists, educators, and other online creators whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation,” as quoted by PPC Land.

Then he pointed elsewhere. The antitrust statutes, Forbes reports he wrote, are not a substitute for legislative action addressing “economic dislocation caused by new innovation,” and any gaps in the law’s reach are questions “for Congress or regulators to consider.”

This is the same judge who ruled in August 2024 that Google illegally maintained a search monopoly, then declined in September 2025 to make it sell Chrome. He has spent years inside the mechanics of Google Search. He still found the publishers’ theory didn’t fit the statute.

From courtroom to rate card

Our read: with the leading antitrust route blocked, the fight over AI answers becomes a pricing negotiation in which Google sets the price.

Google is already running one. Its “AI contribution pilot,” first detailed by Digiday and reported by Search Engine Roundtable on Sept. 14, pays sites when Google judges their content “contributes significantly” to answers in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the Gemini app, with earnings shown in Search Console. 9to5Google reported that at least dozens of mostly small and mid-sized publishers are in it. Google decides what counts as a contribution and what it is worth.

Some reports put the pilot at around 100 publishers; Android Headlines attributes that figure to Reuters, which we could not open. We would treat it as unconfirmed.

Canada already tried the Congress route

Mehta’s suggestion, that Parliament rather than a court should decide what platforms owe news, is the bet Canada made with the Online News Act. The result was a single cheque: Google sent CA$100 million (about US$72 million) to the Canadian Journalism Collective in exchange for an exemption from the law, CBC reported in January 2025, working out to roughly CA$13,798 per full-time journalist at eligible outlets. Meta chose to block news in Canada instead.

That deal was negotiated around links in search. Our analysis: whether AI Overviews, which answer the question so the user never clicks, fall inside that arrangement is the next fight for Canadian publishers, and nothing in Mehta’s ruling settles it.

Penske and Chegg have the option to appeal. For everyone else, the market price of a news article in an AI answer is now whatever the Search Console widget says.