A judge threw out the AI Overviews lawsuits against Google. Page 25 of his ruling reads like an apology.

“An expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.”

That’s Judge Amit Mehta of the federal court in Washington, D.C., in a 41-page opinion dated September 30. With it he dismissed two antitrust lawsuits against Google over AI Overviews, the AI summaries that sit at the top of search results. One came from Chegg, the homework-help company. The other came from Penske Media and nine of its brands, including Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline. Engadget covered the ruling on October 1, citing Reuters, and that line is the one getting passed around.

I read the whole opinion. The line is accurate, and it’s also a little misleading on its own, because five pages later Mehta says something publishers will probably find more useful.

What the publishers argued

Both complaints were nearly identical, and the theory was clever. Publishers let Google crawl their pages; Google sends them visitors in return. The publishers called that a trade, their content for Google’s traffic, and argued Google changed the terms once AI Overviews started answering questions right on the results page. Penske said its sites reach more than 120 million monthly visitors in the US. Chegg pointed to its database of 135 million question-and-answer solutions and said it had already signed licensing deals with two tech companies worth millions, which is roughly what it thinks Google should be paying too.

They also argued they couldn’t really say no. According to the complaints, Google’s “Google-Extended” setting stops content from being used to improve Google’s models but doesn’t stop it being used to train base models or to generate answers in search. The only full exit is blocking Google’s crawler, which means disappearing from search. Chegg’s complaint called that “a Hobson’s choice.”

Why it failed anyway

Mehta’s answer, over and over, was that there was never a deal to break. Antitrust “reciprocal dealing” claims need some meeting of the minds, and the publishers didn’t allege any: no terms offered and accepted, no negotiation over quantity or exclusivity, no communications with Google. They had only an expectation that traffic would keep coming. Hence the quote.

Penske alone brought a tying claim, and it ran into something odder. Penske argued search and AI Overviews were separate products that Google forced together. But the publishers’ own complaints say users who get an answer from AI Overviews have “little reason” to click through. Mehta took that as evidence people want the same thing from both, an answer to their question. He also noted DuckDuckGo puts AI summaries on top of its results too, which undercut the idea that Google was doing something no competitor would.

Standing sank the monopoly-maintenance claims. Mehta said the publishers’ losses happen in publishing, not in the search market, so they’re the wrong plaintiffs for a search-monopoly case. He’d already said much the same in March, when he threw out a similar suit from Helena World Chronicle.

Mehta never really decided the state-law unjust enrichment claims. Once the federal claims were gone, he declined to hear them. In federal practice that usually leaves room to file them in state court, though neither company has said anything about doing that, and Engadget’s requests for comment hadn’t been answered.

The paragraph that was written for someone else

Here’s the passage, from page 25:

“The court does not treat Plaintiffs’ alleged harms lightly. Nor is it unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in, and the knock-on consequences to journalists, educators, and other online creators whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation.”

He then says antitrust law isn’t a substitute for a legislature and that any gap in it “is an issue for Congress” or regulators.

The same federal judge who ruled Google a search monopolist in 2024 just wrote that Google “takes and repurposes” creators’ content “without compensation,” and then said his hands were tied. It’s about as close as a judge gets to telling the losing side to go knock on a different door.

Two sources describe the publishers' options differently. Engadget wrote that publishers can exclude pages from AI Overviews and still appear in regular results. The complaints, as Mehta summarized them, say opting out of snippets cuts search visibility and Google-Extended doesn't cover AI answers in search. Mehta didn't rule on which description is right. If you run a site, check Google's current documentation on snippet controls before changing anything.

Where I land

I think Mehta got the law right and I’m not happy about it. The publishers’ theory needed a bargain that never existed in writing, and judges don’t invent contracts. But the result is that the one company most able to pay for news and reference content now has a federal opinion saying it doesn’t have to, at least under antitrust law. Chegg and Penske can appeal, and the order is final and appealable. I wouldn’t bet much on it given how consistent Mehta has been across three publisher cases.

The more practical question is whether Congress picks up the hint. Washington is busy with AI this fall, and almost all of it is about safety: the FTC probe of the big labs and the White House accord signed on September 29. Paying the people whose writing the answers are built from hasn’t gotten the same attention. Google’s own AI push keeps getting bigger, too, as its Gemini 4 Argon launch and pricing showed on September 30. If nobody in Congress writes a bill about content payments, this ruling is where the argument ends.

Sources

1. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia: Memorandum Opinion, Chegg, Inc. v. Google LLC and Penske Media Corp. v. Google LLC (PDF via CourtListener), September 30, 2026
2. Engadget: Judge dismisses lawsuits claiming Google’s AI Overviews siphon web traffic, October 1, 2026
3. Reuters: Google wins dismissal of Chegg, Penske Media lawsuits over AI Overviews, October 1, 2026 (cited by Engadget; the page didn’t load for me, so details here come from the opinion and Engadget)
4. AI Weekly: Judge Mehta dismisses Chegg and Penske AI Overviews antitrust suits, October 2, 2026