US District Judge Amit Mehta rejected the arguments from Chegg, an education platform, and Penske Media, which owns Rolling Stone and Variety. The companies claimed Google abused its monopoly power by forcing publishers to supply content for free or risk disappearing from search results. The judge found that Google's conduct does not violate antitrust law. He wrote that the plaintiffs' claims do not stand up to legal scrutiny.

Chegg alleged that Google scraped its educational content to train Gemini models, effectively recreating it and reducing site traffic. Penske argued that it was unfair for sites indexed for organic search to have their content harvested for AI answers without an opt-out. The judge dismissed these arguments, stating that Google's implicit agreement with websites is not legally relevant. He emphasised that an expectation of traffic is not an agreement.

The lawsuits were filed in 2025, and Google had requested a dismissal earlier this year. The ruling is a setback for publishers concerned about the impact of AI search on their traffic. The judge's decision highlights the ongoing legal challenges surrounding AI and search. The case underscores the difficulty of proving antitrust violations in the context of AI-generated search results.