Google’s rollout of AI Overviews has triggered a raft of lawsuits and regulatory complaints from publishers and content creators around the world. The legal basis for these cases varies, but the common thread is an attempt to frame traffic loss as an actionable harm worthy of a remedy. At the heart of these claims is the demand for recognition of something like a “right to traffic.”

These legal actions are unlikely to succeed in establishing such a right, since traffic is neither an entitlement nor a form of property. AI summaries may divert traffic, and Google may be engaging in anti-competitive practices in creating them. But overviews do not appropriate content or unfairly exploit it; they’re a form of platform speech that is often helpful and efficient—and that users have a right to access.

The actions against Google emphasize the abuse of its dominant position in search and frame Google as an unfair competitor in content creation, if not an outright infringer of copyright. But the attempt to rely on copyright and antitrust law is really an indirect attempt to assert what can’t be claimed directly: a property right in clicks. The lawsuits leave out of the picture entirely the user’s right to receive information in any format they choose—and in this case, a revolutionary and enormously powerful one.

In the US, for example, educational content creator Chegg Inc alleges that Google’s AI Overviews unfairly repurposes its content as a condition for providing referral traffic, abusing its monopoly in search to gain an advantage in an adjacent market (content provision) by reducing competitors’ traffic. Penske, the owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, makes a similar claim that Google forces them to provide their content for AI overviews—as a condition of search visibility—reducing traffic and ad revenue to their sites.

In Europe, the Independent Publishers Alliance (IPA), along with the Movement for an Open Web, has filed a complaint against Google’s AI Overviews with the European Commission and the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority. The claim here is the same: Google is abusing its monopoly by forcing participation as a condition of visibility, leaving the publishers no meaningful way to opt out of Google’s otherwise unauthorized use of their content. A complaint with Germany’s Federal Network Agency, in its oversight role under the EU’s Digital Services Act, alleges that AI Overviews threaten media diversity and free expression, and that the opaque algorithms and models underlying them breach DSA provisions on transparency, misinformation, and system bias.

Faulty claims underlying the case against AI Overviews

The argument that Google is abusing its dominance in search to coerce content creators to play along is forceful. But it comes bundled with two distinct and tenuous claims: that providing an AI overview violates copyright and that diverting traffic amounts to theft. Both claims are made in actions against a much smaller company, Perplexity—in one case by Dow Jones and the New York Post, and in another by Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster. Dow Jones and the Post allege that Perplexity’s outputs “often include full or partial verbatim reproductions of Plaintiffs’ news, analysis, and opinion articles.” Britannica and Merriam-Webster claim that Perplexity “free rides” on their content.

Neither claim is persuasive. A summary — even one that reproduces snippets of source content verbatim — can still be fair use. The test for this is multi-factored, but key considerations are whether the use is transformative and substantial in terms of quantity or quality. AI Overviews can clearly be transformative, producing something different in nature and purpose from the original while avoiding substantial copying. This is not “free riding” by Google but rather a more efficient form of information delivery.

AI overviews are now a pervasive part of the information landscape, with tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, among others, making a creator’s susceptibility to being summarized by AI an inherent condition of publishing content on the web.

AI summaries may cause traffic loss, but this has to be seen as part of a larger historical trend: users look for information where they can find it most efficiently. A story of ever-greater aggregation. Recent attempts to resist this trend point to the futility of resisting the shift to AI summaries.

Lessons from the news publishers’ rights movement

Over the last decade, governments in Australia, Canada, and Europe experimented with laws to force platforms to pay publishers when they featured or linked to news content. Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code (2021) created a system of mandatory bargaining and arbitration that prompted Facebook to block news temporarily before reaching a deal with the government. Canada’s Online News Act (2023) led Meta to withdraw news from Facebook altogether, while Google conceded to $100-million annual payment to a collective fund.

In Europe, Article 15 of the EU Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (2019) created a new “neighbouring right” for press publishers to authorize reproduction of their articles by large platforms (snippets and links excepted); but its most visible results came through French regulators imposing fines on Google to force negotiations. Earlier efforts—Spain’s “link tax” in 2014, which drove Google News offline for years, and Germany’s 2013 ancillary right, which publishers largely waived—showed again how dependent publishers were on platforms for visibility.

These episodes reveal that publishers couldn’t compel platforms to treat links or snippets as a form of property, and efforts to gain compensation for featuring content itself had limited success. Where platforms judged the costs too high, they simply walked away, and publishers needed them back.

The current complaints about AI Overviews are even more tenuous: here, platforms are not reproducing or displaying articles directly but offering something like a blend of search results and a summary of their content. If summaries are not copies, the claim for compensation falls apart.

Traffic is declining, but how much?

There is clear evidence that AI Overviews are reducing click-through traffic from search engines, but the extent of the impact is unclear.

In March, the Pew Research Center tracked 900 US users over 68,000 Google searches and found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked on a traditional result in just 8% of sessions—versus 15% when no summary was offered. Clicking links within the AI summary itself was even rarer (roughly 1% of sessions). Users encountering a summary were also more likely to abandon the session altogether (26% vs. 16%). A study by SEO service Ahrefs analyzed a large corpus of keywords and estimated that AI Overviews correlate with a 34.5% drop in organic clickthroughs for top-ranking pages after the feature was introduced.

Google has called these initial findings into question. It argues the samples were too small or nonrepresentative, and traffic shifts might stem from broader algorithm changes, seasonal trends, or external factors. The company stresses it still sends “billions of clicks to websites daily.”

The attempt to wave away the problem is no doubt self-serving. SEO analysts and site operators concede there’s a varying degree of impact across verticals, query types, and site categories—but point to many examples of sites reporting steep declines, suggesting the problem is pervasive and real.

Larger problems with a “right to traffic”

But even if we assume that AI Overviews are making a serious dent in search traffic, the effort to gain recognition of a right to traffic indirectly—based on copyright or antitrust law—is destined to fail.

There’s no getting around the facts. Search rankings are a protected form of expression, and summaries that do not contain excessive amounts of verbatim reproduction are fair use. We can quibble over how much quotation in a summary is too much, but the act of summarizing itself clearly qualifies as fair use. AI summaries are not going away.

Google may be abusing its dominance in search to compel publishers to play along, but since multiple factors affect traffic beyond AI Overviews alone, and as AI search becomes pervasive, forcing Google to change its approach likely won’t change much in the larger picture. The internet landscape is shifting.

Publishers are right to be concerned about their business models, but AI overviews and search will continue to reshape how users find information. Lawsuits won’t stop the tide from turning. The real question now is how to support content creation in an AI-driven information economy without clinging to a phantom right to traffic.