For a long time, Google and news sites had a simple relationship: Google indexed their articles and sent them traffic in return. The rise of artificial intelligence, on the other hand, has changed this “economic compact” in a big way. The European Publishers Council (EPC) filed a formal antitrust complaint with the European Commission (EU) this week, alleging that Google’s new AI features are not helping publishers anymore but replacing them.
Why Google’s AI Overviews face an EPC antitrust complaint in the EU
“AI Overviews” and other LLM-based features are the core of this disagreement. Currently, Google often shows a detailed summary at the top of the page when you search for something. Publishers say that these summaries are so comprehensive that readers feel they don’t need to click through to the original source anymore.
The EPC calls this “systematic traffic substitution.” According to some reports, some businesses have seen their traffic drop by up to 40% since Google rolled out these AI tools. Publishers are essentially accusing Google of using their high-quality, professionally edited journalism to train its AI and keep users within its own ecosystem. This might be cutting off the revenue that keeps newsrooms alive.
An “untenable choice”
One of the most frustrating aspects for media companies is the lack of control. The complaint says that publishers are in a tough spot: they can either let Google crawl their content and use it to make AI summaries, or they can choose not to let Google do this and risk losing all of their visibility in general search results.
For most media brands, disappearing from Google Search isn’t a realistic option. The EPC argues that the current technical controls Google offers don’t provide a meaningful way to protect journalism without committing “digital suicide.” Other AI companies have begun signing licensing deals to pay for the content they use. However, the publishers claim Google is using its dominant market power to avoid such agreements.
What is at stake?
Google has pushed back against these claims. The company stated that their AI features are designed to surface great content and that publishers have easy-to-use controls. They argue that these complaints are simply an attempt to hold back new technologies that users actually want.
That said, the publishers warn that the damage could be irreversible. If news organizations lose the ability to attract advertisers and build direct relationships with readers, the pluralism of the media landscape—and by extension, democratic discourse—could be at risk.
The European Commission is already investigating Google’s use of web content for AI, and we should have more developments on this in the coming weeks.
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