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A federal judge dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought by Chegg and Penske Media and affiliated publishers against Google on September 30, 2026. The decision is a major setback for those plaintiffs’ claims that Google used its search position to obtain publisher content and then competed with publishers through AI answers. It is not a ruling that Google’s use of copyrighted works to train AI is lawful: the court decided whether the complaints adequately pleaded antitrust and related state-law claims, not copyright infringement or fair use. Read the court’s opinion.
What the publishers alleged
Chegg, an online educational publisher, and Penske Media Corporation and affiliated publishers alleged that Google conditioned access to search referral traffic on publishers letting it crawl and reuse their content. The alleged uses included search snippets, language-model training, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) answers. The publishers argued that AI-generated answers compete with their sites and reduce visits that can lead to advertising revenue and subscriptions. Those are allegations described in the opinion, not facts established at trial.
Penske Media’s affiliated publishers include Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline. Both lawsuits were framed as antitrust cases, including reciprocal-dealing and monopolization-related claims, and also raised state-law unjust-enrichment claims. Chegg filed its action on February 24, 2025; Penske Media filed on September 12, 2025.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsWhy the judge dismissed the cases
The complaints did not plausibly allege a bargain
The publishers argued that making content available to Google in exchange for search referrals amounted to reciprocal dealing. Judge Amit P. Mehta found that they had not pleaded facts showing a written or oral commercial agreement. The alleged implied bargain also lacked essential terms, such as price or quantity.
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The court reasoned that publishers keep content available for crawling to pursue their own interest in search traffic. That expectation alone did not plausibly establish an agreement with Google. As the judge put it, “an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.” The ruling concerns the pleadings in these lawsuits; it does not establish that no publisher could ever have a separate agreement with Google.
The publishers did not show antitrust standing in general search
The court rejected the publishers’ argument that they participated in the general-search market by supplying content or purchasing traffic. It viewed alleged uncompensated content and lost subscription revenue as injuries in digital-publishing markets, rather than injuries suffered within the general-search market. The court also noted a tension in treating search traffic as both the consideration publishers supposedly supplied and the product they bought.
The proposed markets were not adequately defined
Penske Media proposed an online-publishing market covering nearly all text-based content available online. The court found that definition implausibly broad because the complaint did not explain why materially different works—a blog post, legal brief, fictional story, and news article, for example—should be treated as substitutes in one market.
Chegg’s proposed online-educational-publishing market was also too vague. Its complaint did not adequately explain how characteristics such as curation, verification, authority, and pedagogical focus distinguished educational content from other nonfiction.
The state claims were dismissed too
After dismissing the federal claims, the court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the plaintiffs’ California unjust-enrichment claims and dismissed them as well.
What this ruling does—and does not—decide
This was a decision on motions to dismiss, not a trial verdict about whether Google used publisher content in the ways alleged. The court did not adjudicate copyright infringement or fair use for AI training. It ruled on the sufficiency of these plaintiffs’ antitrust and related state-law pleadings.
That distinction matters when comparing this case with lawsuits that directly claim copyright infringement over copies made for model training. A dismissal of these antitrust complaints does not, by itself, authorize every use of publisher content for AI.
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Does the decision change what publishers can block?
The opinion does not decide what controls publishers can use to block Google from crawling content or including it in AI answers. It addresses the legal claims in Chegg’s and Penske Media’s lawsuits, not a general right to control search indexing or a specific opt-out mechanism. The decision also should not be treated as the outcome of a separate copyright case involving Google or Gemini; the legal theory, challenged conduct, and procedural status of that case must be considered independently.
Why the ruling matters to publishers
The decision makes it harder for these plaintiffs to pursue the particular antitrust theories they pleaded: they did not adequately allege an exchange agreement, define the relevant markets, or establish standing for claims tied to general search. The judge also acknowledged the stakes for online publishers, journalists, educators, and other creators, writing that the court was “not unsympathetic” to their situation. But the opinion says the court must apply the law as written; that concern did not cure the complaints’ pleading problems.
Ars Technica published a contemporaneous summary on October 1, 2026, including the judge’s discussion of publishers’ expectations and the consequences they face: Ars Technica’s coverage.
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