Google faces EU antitrust complaint over AI Overviews

A gaggle generally known as the Unbiased Publishers Alliance has filed an antitrust grievance with the European Fee over Google’s AI Overviews, according to Reuters.

The grievance accuses Google of “misusing net content material for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have brought on, and proceed to trigger, vital hurt to publishers, together with information publishers within the type of site visitors, readership and income loss.”

It additionally says that except they’re keen to vanish from Google search outcomes solely, publishers “shouldn’t have the choice to decide out” of their materials being utilized in AI summaries.

It’s been slightly over a yr since Google started including AI-generated summaries on the prime of some net search outcomes, and regardless of some early solutions that have been spectacularly off-base, the characteristic continues to expand, to the purpose the place it’s reportedly inflicting major traffic declines for news publishers.

Google advised Reuters that “new AI experiences in Search allow folks to ask much more questions, which creates new alternatives for content material and companies to be found.” The corporate additionally argued that claims about net site visitors are sometimes based mostly on incomplete knowledge, and that “websites can acquire and lose site visitors for quite a lot of causes.”