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EU and UK Regulators Launch Antitrust Probes into Google’s AI Overviews

Regulators weigh complaints over Google’s practice of diverting publisher traffic through uncompensated AI summaries.

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google's annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025. (Photo by Camille Cohen / AFP)
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Overview

  • The European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority have opened formal investigations into Google’s AI Overviews feature after complaints filed early this month.
  • Independent Publishers Alliance, Foxglove and Movement for an Open Web allege that AI-generated summaries misappropriate web content and cause substantial losses in traffic, readership and revenue.
  • Complainants claim publishers cannot opt out of AI Overviews without losing standard search indexing, effectively forcing their inclusion in Google’s AI training data.
  • Data from Similarweb indicates that no-click news searches have risen from 56% to nearly 69% since the feature launched in May 2024, intensifying publisher concerns.
  • Google counters that its AI summaries generate billions of clicks daily and argues that they open new channels for content discovery.