Google Faces Antitrust Complaint In The EU Over AI Overviews

Google’s parent company,  Alphabet, has been hit with an antitrust complaint in the European Union over its AI Overview tool. An organized group, the Independent Publishers Alliance, submitted the complaint to the European Commisssion, alleging that Google is abusing its dominance in online search.

According to Reuters, the publishers have requested an interim measure to avoid “irreparable harm” to their businesses. AI Overviews—the AI-generated summaries that began rolling out across multiple regions in August last year—, is now active in over 100 countries and started displaying advertisement in May.

Google’s move has sparked concerns among publishers. The Independent Publishers Alliance filed the complaint on June 30.

“Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss,” states the document, as reported by Reuters.

The publishers claim that Google’s placement of its AI Overviews tool, at the top of the search results uses content developed by them and negatively impacts the visibility and traffic of their original content.

“Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google’s AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google’s general search results page,” explained the publishers in the complaint.

Google said it disagrees with the publishers’ claims. The tech giant stated that it send billions of clicks to publishers’ websites every day.

“New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered,” said spokesperson from Google to Reuters. “The reality is that sites can gain and lose traffic for a variety of reasons, including seasonal demand, interests of users, and regular algorithmic updates to Search.”

Another organization that includes multiple advertisers and publishers, Movement for an Open Web, also signed the Independent Publishers Alliance’s complaint.

Last week, Cloudflare announced Pay Per Crawl, a new system that allows publishers to charge AI bots for access to their content.