Google’s AI Overviews feature — the company’s much-hyped generative search tool — is now under formal antitrust scrutiny in Europe, after a coalition of independent publishers filed a complaint with the European Commission alleging the system is “abusing dominance” and devastating the online news ecosystem.
The complaint, filed by a group known as the Independent Publishers Alliance and supported by advocacy group Movement for an Open Web and legal campaigners Foxglove, accuses Google of misusing web content to power its AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, effectively cutting publishers out of the value chain.
“It’s clear: independent news faces an existential threat,” said Rosa Curling of Foxglove. “Google’s AI Overviews scrape and summarize the work of journalists and publishers without permission, diverting readers away and crushing the business model of news.”
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The group is now demanding interim measures from EU competition regulators to temporarily halt or restrict Google’s AI Overviews while the complaint is being investigated.
AI Overviews and the ‘Zero-Click’ Surge
At the heart of the complaint is the growing trend of zero-click searches — queries that no longer result in users visiting external websites. Since the launch of Google’s AI Overviews in May 2024, the number of news-related searches that end without a click-through to a publisher has surged from 56% to nearly 69%, according to data from digital intelligence firm Similarweb.
The effects are already rippling across the industry. Organic traffic to news sites, once driven largely by search engine referrals, has plunged. At its peak in mid-2024, news sites were receiving over 2.3 billion visits per month via search. By May 2025, that figure had fallen below 1.7 billion.
These declines come at a time when AI is becoming the first stop for users seeking not just facts but context, summaries, and background information — needs traditionally filled by publishers.
No Real Opt-Out
One of the key arguments in the antitrust complaint is that Google gives publishers no meaningful choice. While technically a publisher can opt out of having their content used in AI Overviews, doing so would remove them from general Google search results altogether — a move that amounts to digital invisibility for most.
“You either let Google use your content to train and feed its AI, or you disappear from search entirely,” said one publisher backing the complaint. “That’s not consent. That’s coercion.”
The Alliance says this practice violates competition rules by forcing publishers into a lose-lose scenario: contribute free labor to a product that competes with their own, or face total marginalization.
Google’s Response
Google defended its AI Overviews feature in a statement to Reuters, saying the new AI experiences “enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered.” It also disputed the data cited in the complaint, arguing that traffic patterns are shaped by a “variety of reasons,” including seasonality and user trends.
The tech giant maintains that it sends billions of clicks to publishers every day, and that AI Overviews are designed to enhance — not replace — the discovery of content online.
A Wider Regulatory Storm
The complaint is the latest in a growing wave of regulatory actions and lawsuits confronting AI-driven search. A similar complaint has been filed with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. In the U.S., textbook and ed-tech company Chegg filed a lawsuit earlier this year, accusing Google’s AI Overviews of diverting traffic away from its educational resources.
Meanwhile, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in Europe is tightening scrutiny over platform dominance, with Google already facing probes into whether it is unfairly favoring its own services over rivals.
If the European Commission agrees to impose interim measures, Google could be forced to suspend or radically modify how AI Overviews function within EU territory — a move that would mark one of the most significant regulatory pushbacks against generative AI so far.
Winners and Losers in the AI Era
While AI Overviews appear to be draining traffic from traditional news sites, not every publisher is faring equally. Similarweb data shows that ChatGPT — OpenAI’s competing AI tool — is driving rising traffic to some news outlets, although not at a scale that replaces losses from Google Search.
Between January 2024 and May 2025, ChatGPT referrals to news sites rose from under 1 million to over 25 million, with top gainers including Reuters (up 8.9%), New York Post (7.1%), and Business Insider (6.5%). The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI over content scraping, saw a smaller increase of 3.1%.
ChatGPT-related news prompts also surged 212% over the same period, driven by growing interest in finance, sports, politics, and the economy.
But these gains remain a fraction of what publishers have lost overall. Many newsrooms have already implemented layoffs or shut down entirely. Others are scrambling to adopt alternative revenue models — from subscriptions and paywalls to Google’s Offerwall tool, which encourages micropayments or newsletter signups instead of ad-dependent clickbait.
A Fight for the Future of Journalism
At stake in this battle is not just the fate of one Google feature but the sustainability of independent journalism in the AI age.
By harvesting and rephrasing publisher content into bite-sized summaries, AI Overviews — critics argue — not only erode traffic and ad revenue but risk turning original reporting into a kind of invisible scaffolding for Google’s own products.
The European Commission has not yet publicly responded to the complaint, but its handling of the case could set a global precedent for how AI platforms must treat — and potentially compensate — the creators whose work fuels their models.
