On AI summaries and knowledge monopolies..

I've seen my own ad revenue tank, and I am aware this is at least partly due to Google's AI summaries resulting in less click-through, and I'm clearly not the only one feeling this pinch....

Mountain View, California – The publisher of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter, Penske Media, has become the first big U.S. publisher to sue Google over its new AI Overviews feature. The suit could be a tipping point in how technology titans use and profit from other people's journalism.

The Problem with AI Overviews

Google's AI Summaries generate automatic abstracts at the top of search results, culled from multiple online sources. Great from a user perspective: no click-through needed, answer in hand. But terrible from the publisher's perspective. Google is essentially steering traffic around news sites by scraping content and serving it up in AI-constructed form which is choking both ad and subscription business.

Even though the AI digests sometimes include links to the sites themselves, most people don't click anymore, which undermines the economic foundations of journalism: fewer clicks mean fewer ads that have been seen and fewer paying subscribers.

Monopoly Power and Coercion Claims

At the heart of Penske's grievance is an accusation that Google is taking advantage of its monopoly in the marketplace. The company asserts that publishers are being coerced into allowing Google to share their content — because if they don't, they will be excluded from search results altogether. That is, join or be gone.

This echoes old grumblings about Big Tech's grip on streams of information. From the Facebook-newspaper war in Australia to current struggles between OpenAI and large newspapers, the swivel between creativity and intellectual property is again coming under fire. Google has called the lawsuit "meritless," but the timing is dire: a trillion-dollar firm using journalism as fuel for its AI engine, as publishers struggle to survive.

Final Thoughts

This is not a case about one publisher or one AI product. It's a case about whether journalism has any viable future in the age of AI. If tech giants can scrape, summarize, and profit from reporting without compensation, the business model for sustaining real journalism crumbles. As The Guardian recently warned, "AI doesn't replace journalism — it feeds on it."

Penske's lawsuit could open the door to broader regulation and whether it succeeds or not, one thing is certain: the tired old traffic model, based on search, is disintegrating. And the next media-tech war has already begun.

The scary thing is I have no idea how to stay ahead of this!

Sources:

The Guardian – "Google's AI summaries spark fury among publishers" (2024)

Reuters – "Rolling Stone owner sues Google over AI-generated search results" (2025)