Penske Media v. Google: the antitrust timeline so far

Two separate proceedings now put Google’s use of publisher content in AI Overviews in front of regulators and a federal court. One is a private antitrust lawsuit brought by Penske Media Corporation, publisher of Rolling Stone, Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard. The other is a competition-law complaint the European Publishers Council filed with the European Commission five months later. Both are real, dated filings, not settled outcomes, and neither has produced a ruling yet.

The timeline#

• 12 September 2025 - Penske Media Corporation and 14 affiliated publishing entities file suit against Google LLC in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Case No. 1:25-cv-03192. The 101-page complaint names Bard, Gemini, Search Generative Experience, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and seeks treble damages under the Sherman Act.
• 14 January 2026 - Google moves to dismiss, arguing Penske’s claims are, in Google’s own words, “legally defective in every way.”
• 10 February 2026 - The European Publishers Council files a separate antitrust complaint against Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. with the European Commission, alleging abuse of a dominant position under Article 102 TFEU through AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• 12 February 2026 - Penske Media files a 56-page memorandum opposing Google’s motion to dismiss, backed by traffic and revenue figures it says document the harm.

What each filing actually alleges#

Penske’s complaint frames the conduct as Google’s “abuse of its adjudicated monopoly in General Search Services to coerce online publishers like PMC to supply content that Google republishes without permission in AI-generated answers that unfairly compete for the attention of users on the Internet.” Its February opposition memorandum argues the conduct qualifies for per se treatment under tying law, on the theory that Google conditions continued search visibility on publishers supplying content for AI training and AI Overview use, and separately argues monopoly maintenance and coercive reciprocal dealing. To support the harm claim, the memorandum cites a click-through-rate decline of up to 34.5 percent for the top organic result when an AI Overview appears on the results page, and states that organic affiliate revenue across the Penske Media portfolio has fallen by more than a third from its 2024 peak. Google’s motion to dismiss, filed the prior month, does not appear in press coverage with a detailed public rebuttal of those figures; it argues the legal theories themselves do not state a viable antitrust claim.

The European Publishers Council’s complaint is a distinct instrument: not a request for damages but a request that the European Commission investigate Google under EU competition law. EPC chairman Christian Van Thillo characterized the target as “a dominant gatekeeper from using its market power to take publishers’ content without consent, without fair compensation,” and without a meaningful opt-out. The complaint follows an antitrust investigation the European Commission itself opened in December 2025 into Google’s use of publisher and YouTube-creator content to build its AI products, and argues Google has turned Search from a referral service into an answer engine that substitutes for the publisher’s own page rather than sending a visitor to it.

Why we care#

This site has covered AI Overviews and AI-crawler access mostly as a policy and opt-out question: whether to allow Google-Extended, how to read a robots.txt directive, whether blocking a crawler costs more traffic than it saves. Penske’s lawsuit and the EPC’s complaint move part of that conversation into a courtroom and a competition regulator’s inbox. Neither filing has produced a ruling, and this site is not qualified to predict one. What is now real, and traceable to dated public filings, is that a major publisher has put a number on the traffic cost of AI Overviews inside a formal legal complaint, and a body representing European publishers has asked a regulator to treat the same conduct as an abuse of dominance. Whatever a court or the Commission eventually decides, technical SEO practitioners now have two concrete, citable documents describing how a publisher and a regulator each frame the harm, worth reading alongside the voluntary opt-out guidance covered elsewhere on this site, not instead of it.