Penske Media and Chegg have appealed an order granting Google's motion to dismiss their antitrust claims to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. The two publishers accuse Google of using its search monopoly to coerce online publishers into providing content for AI Overviews at no cost.
In lawsuits filed last year, education platform Chegg and Penske Media Corporation, the parent company of Rolling Stone, accused Google of abusing its monopoly power by pressuring publishers into supplying content for AI Overviews for free, or risk being removed from search results altogether. The claim frames AI Overviews as a Hobson's choice: supply the content or lose the traffic.
The appeal, reported by MLex on October 29, 2026, keeps that argument alive after a district judge rejected it. The publishers are asking the appeals court to revive claims that the trial court found did not hold up under antitrust law.
US District Judge Amit Mehta, who previously issued the landmark 2024 antitrust ruling against Google, ruled in Google's favour on the AI Overviews claims. He found that the plaintiffs had pleaded only an expectation that Google would send them search traffic if they made their content available for free, and that such an expectation does not state an antitrust violation.
Mehta added that antitrust rules cannot substitute for a legislative decision on how to address the economic impact of new innovation. That reasoning is significant: it pushes the publisher-versus-AI-platform fight toward legislatures and regulators rather than the courts, at least on this legal theory.
An appeal does not reopen the case on its own, and it does not change how AI Overviews work today. What it does is preserve a legal avenue that publishers feared was closing, and it keeps the coercion argument in front of an appellate court that will weigh it afresh.
Publishers should not expect a quick resolution. Appeals of this kind run for many months, and the outcome will turn on legal questions about monopoly power and coercion rather than on traffic data alone. In the meantime, the commercial reality is unchanged: AI Overviews continue to summarise publisher content, and publishers continue to depend on search traffic.
The appeal sits alongside a crowded regulatory calendar. The European Commission is pursuing its own investigation into Google's use of publisher content for AI purposes, French publishers have complained to the Commission over AI Overviews and AI Mode in France, and the US remedies case continues separately in the DC Circuit.
For SEOs, the pattern is clear: the rules governing AI search are being written in parallel in courts, regulators, and standards bodies. No single case will settle the question of how AI answers may use publisher content, and strategy should assume a long period of overlapping, sometimes conflicting rules.
Keep building content that earns direct relationships, not just search visits. Email lists, loyal audiences, and brand searches are the assets that survive any single ruling about AI Overviews, because they do not depend on one surface's traffic decisions.
At the same time, keep optimising for citation inside AI answers. Whether the legal theory succeeds or fails, the commercial fact is that AI answers cite some pages and not others, and the cited pages get the clicks and links. Original reporting, unique data, and clear expertise remain the best route into those citations.
If the publishers win on appeal, the case returns to the trial court, where they would still need to prove their claims rather than merely plead them. A win reopens the fight; it does not settle it, and it does not by itself change how AI Overviews operate. If they lose, the antitrust theory is narrowed further, and publishers would need to look to legislation or regulation for the remedies courts will not grant.
Either way, the commercial timeline is longer than the news cycle. Publishers making decisions today should assume AI Overviews keep operating in roughly their current form for many months, and should build audience and citation strategies that work under that assumption rather than waiting for a court to change the landscape.
Sources: MLex, October 29, 2026.
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