Google AI Overviews Faces EU Antitrust Complaint From Publishers Over Traffic And Revenue Loss

Google’s AI Overviews—a generative AI feature —has triggered an antitrust complaint from independent publishers in the EU, who allege that the feature harms their traffic, revenue, and long-term sustainability.

About Antitrust

Antitrust refers to laws and regulations that prevent companies from engaging in unfair practices that harm competition, such as monopolies, price-fixing, or abusing market dominance.
For example, Google faced antitrust investigations for allegedly using its dominance in search and Android to unfairly promote its own services over competitors’, limiting consumer choice.

What are Google AI Overviews?

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google’s search results page, above the traditional blue links. They synthesise information from multiple sources to quickly answer user queries.
These overviews may take the form of paragraphs, lists, or tables, and include embedded source links.

About Generative AI

It refers to artificial intelligence systems that can produce original content—such as text, images, audio, video, or code—based on user prompts or instructions.
These tools are powered by advanced AI models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), which form the backbone of many text-based applications like ChatGPT.
Generative AI is built on deep learning, a branch of machine learning that uses algorithms modeled after the human brain’s neural networks to simulate learning and decision-making.

How do AI Overviews work?

When a query is entered, Google evaluates whether a generative AI response would be helpful.
It uses a customized version of its AI model, Gemini, combined with a method called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which pulls information from the web index in real time.
The output is a summary backed by top web results, with clickable links for deeper exploration.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI framework that combines the strengths of traditional information retrieval systems (such as search and databases) with the capabilities of generative large language models (LLMs).

Why are publishers accusing Google?

Reducing user click-throughs to publisher websites, since users often get their answers directly from the AI summary. This drop leads to lower ad revenue and subscriptions, which are crucial for publishers.
Google is “misusing web content” by scraping publisher material to train its AI and display summaries—without fair compensation.
As of May 2024, Google also began placing ads within AI Overviews, thereby monetising content created by others.
Publishers cannot opt out of AI Overviews without also being removed from Google’s search results entirely—an unfeasible option given Google’s market dominance.

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