is facing a legal challenge from educational technology company Chegg, which claims that the search engine’s artificial intelligence (AI) feature – AI Overviews – is eroding demand for original content and hindering publishers’ ability to compete. AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries of search results that appear in Google Search.
According to a report by news agency Reuters, a lawsuit was filed in Washington, DC, in which Chegg asserted that Google is co-opting publishers' content to keep users on its own site, effectively eliminating the financial incentives that drive content creation.
It argues that Google’s actions will ultimately lead to a “hollowed-out information ecosystem of little use and unworthy of trust.”
The company has reported a decline in website visitors and subscribers since the introduction of Google's AI overviews. As a result, Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz revealed that the company is now exploring a potential sale or take-private transaction.
“Our lawsuit is about more than Chegg – it's about the digital publishing industry, the future of internet search, and about students losing access to quality, step-by-step learning in favor of low-quality, unverified AI summaries,” Schultz stated. He further accused Google of profiting from Chegg's content without compensation.
What Google has to say
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda dismissed the claims as “meritless”,” the report added.
“With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,” Castaneda added.
Chegg's lawsuit centers on the established practice of publishers allowing Google to crawl their websites to generate search results, which Google monetises through advertising. In return, publishers receive search traffic when users click on the results.
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