Overview

• At WIRED’s AI Power Summit in New York, Google policy executive Markham Erickson said users are shifting toward “contextual answers and summaries” and described a goal of a “healthy ecosystem” that includes AI Overviews and traditional links.
• Penske Media filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., alleging Google illegally uses its journalism to generate AI summaries that keep users from visiting its brands’ sites.
• Google said AI Overviews make Search more helpful and expand discovery to a wider set of publishers, with spokesperson Jose Castaneda calling Penske’s allegations meritless.
• Publishers and investigations have reported significant drops in referral traffic when AI Overviews surface, arguing that on-page summaries reduce clicks to original reporting.
• Media executives, including People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel, criticized the requirement to allow Google’s crawler for search indexing, saying it exposes their content to AI Overviews, and they pointed to similar grievances reflected in Chegg’s earlier lawsuit.