A US judge throws out the Chegg and Penske Media AI Overviews cases against Google
In a 41-page opinion dated September 30, 2026, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted Google's motions to dismiss the antitrust suits filed by Chegg and Penske Media Corporation (PMC). In the court's view, a publisher hoping for Google traffic has no agreement with Google; that hope simply reflects how general search operates.
Two cases, one opinion
The memorandum opinion was filed on September 30, 2026 and signed by Judge Amit P. Mehta. It addresses two dockets together: case 25-cv-00543, brought by the education technology company Chegg, and case 25-cv-03192, brought by Penske Media Corporation and related companies. The defendants are Google LLC and its parent, Alphabet. The plaintiffs pleaded several Sherman Act violations along with a common law claim for unjust enrichment. After a consolidated hearing on August 25, 2026, the court granted Google's motions to dismiss both amended complaints.
The publishers' core argument ran like this: Google uses its monopoly in search to make them hand over content for nothing, then reuses that content in products such as AI Overviews and Gemini to compete against them. Press Gazette reports that Penske, whose brands include Variety, Rolling Stone and Hollywood Reporter, said its search impressions and referral visits shrank once AI Overviews rolled out, and that organic revenue from affiliate-linked content had dropped by more than a third from its peak by the end of 2024. That figure is the plaintiff's claim, not a finding by the court. The opinion notes that AI Overviews became available to all US users in August 2024.
An expectation is not a bargain, and AI Overviews is not a separate product
The heart of the ruling is the reciprocal dealing theory. The publishers argued that letting Google crawl their content for free in return for traffic amounted, in practice, to a bargain. Mehta found the complaints described no terms that were offered and accepted, no negotiation, no commitment and no communications showing mutual assent. All they described was a belief that Google would send visitors as long as the content stayed free. That is where the most quoted line of the opinion comes from: "an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works." The first two counts were dismissed on that basis.
Only PMC brought a tying claim. The court held that PMC had not plausibly shown general search and AI Overviews to be two separate products rather than parts of one integrated search experience. For the claims about the market for general search services, the plaintiffs had not pleaded enough facts to establish antitrust standing. The attempted monopolization and monopoly leveraging claims failed because no plausible market was defined. The state law unjust enrichment claims were not decided on the merits; the court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over them. A final, appealable order accompanies the opinion.
Search traffic stays an expectation, not an entitlement
The ruling suggests that publishers who blame AI Overviews for lost traffic will, for now, struggle to fix that through US antitrust law. The court did not treat the link between Google crawling content for free and the search traffic it sends back as a contract. Even so, the judge did not dismiss the publishers' concerns out of hand. He wrote, "The court does not treat Plaintiffs' alleged harms lightly." and added that he was not unsympathetic to them, while placing gaps in antitrust law in the hands of Congress or regulators.
Reactions reflect that tension. Search Engine Roundtable reports that Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint criticized the result, arguing that Google's search monopoly is swallowing journalism while cutting the referral traffic it sends to publishers. Press Gazette notes, as a separate development, that an antitrust case targeting Google's adtech, filed by publishers such as Gannett and the Daily Mail, is going ahead. So the legal fight between publishers and Google continues, but these two AI Overviews cases did not survive the first stage in their current form. We covered the traffic side of this story with Chartbeat data on September 24.
The sources say nothing about Türkiye, so this section is commentary
Neither the court opinion nor the four news sources mention Türkiye. The opinion applies only US antitrust law (the Sherman Act) and does not address Türkiye or any legal system outside the United States. One concrete non-US regulatory step the sources do report comes from the UK: Press Gazette reports that Google is rolling out a Search Console feature that lets publishers opt out of AI Overviews and other AI features, after the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) required it to offer that option. What follows is therefore not drawn from the sources but is explicitly UNALSOFT commentary.
The unknowns, one by one: any figure on traffic lost to AI Overviews by publishers or business sites in Türkiye, any similar lawsuit or competition review in the country, any effect of the ruling on Turkish search results, and whether the plaintiffs will take the decision to a higher court. Our reading is that the ruling is a reminder that traffic from a search engine is not a legally protected return. For any site that gets most of its visitors from Google Search, that makes the risk of tying traffic to a single channel worth thinking about.
UNALSOFT's take
We read this ruling less as a legal story and more as a note on traffic strategy. The court described traffic in return for crawlable content as an expectation, and a business model built on an expectation is fragile. The practical consequence is plain: a site still needs to be easy for search engines to read, but routes that do not depend on search, such as direct visits, brand searches, an email list and your own channels, deserve the same care. That is why on the web design side we treat building a site for both search and returning visitors as its own piece of work. Because the sources carry no data about Türkiye, this article proposes no local legal conclusion.
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