“An expectation is not the same as an agreement”: according to the federal judge, there is no evidence that Google promised publishers traffic in exchange for their content. Chegg’s claim has also been dismissed.
Federal judge Amit Mehta dismissed on 1 October the antitrust complaint filed in September 2025 by Penske Media Corporation, the parent company of Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter or Deadline, against Google and Alphabet. The publisher argued that Google had imposed an implicit market on the media — their content against SEO traffic — and that AI Overviews had broken this market by responding to Internet users without sending them back to the sites.
For the judge, this reasoning is not based on the Sherman Act: the publishers have not demonstrated any agreement by which Google would have committed itself to providing them with a given amount of visits. A traffic expectation, he summarizes, is not a contract, it is simply the operation of a search engine. Chegg's similar complaint, a specialist in school support, had the same fate.
The magistrate, however, said he was sensitive to the situation of publishers, journalists and creators whose content Google takes back without compensation. A way of referring the issue to the contractual or legislative field rather than to competition law.
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