Judge dismisses Chegg and Penske antitrust lawsuits over Google AI search
A US federal judge has dismissed antitrust lawsuits from Chegg and Penske Media accusing Google's AI search products of harming their web traffic, ruling that Google's conduct does not violate antitrust law.
US District Judge Amit Mehta has dismissed two antitrust lawsuits filed against Google by education platform Chegg and media company Penske Media. Both lawsuits were filed in 2025, and Google had asked for their dismissal earlier this year.
The companies alleged that Google products, including AI overviews, violated antitrust law and contributed to steep declines in traffic to their websites. Chegg claimed Google illegally scraped its educational content, allowing its Gemini AI models to effectively recreate that material and divert visitors away from Chegg's site. Penske, which owns publications such as Rolling Stone and Variety, filed a similar complaint, arguing it was unfair that sites indexed for organic search also had their content harvested for AI-generated answers without any way to opt out.
The judge's reasoning
Judge Mehta rejected these arguments, stating that any implicit understanding between Google and websites carries no legal weight. He wrote that the plaintiffs had only described an "expectation" that Google would send them search traffic in exchange for making their content freely available, but an expectation is not a binding agreement — it is simply how a general search engine functions. Since no formal arrangement ever existed between Google and either Chegg or Penske, antitrust law does not apply to the dispute.
Notably, Mehta previously presided over the Department of Justice's long-running antitrust case against Google's search business, in which he ultimately found Google had broken the law — though the government did not secure the severe penalties it had sought in that case.
