Judge Amit Mehta tosses Chegg, Penske suits vs Google AI search

The dismissals stem from lawsuits filed in 2025, after publishers grew worried that Google's AI overviews were cutting into their traffic. Chegg, an education platform, argued that Google illegally scraped its content so Gemini could recreate it, while Penske Media, which owns Rolling Stone and Variety, complained that sites indexed for organic search also had their content harvested for AI answers with no way to opt out.

Judge Mehta's ruling centers on the absence of a formal contract. He wrote that plaintiffs pleaded only an "expectation" that Google would send search traffic if they made content available for free, and that "an expectation is not an agreement." Because Google never had a formal arrangement with either company, antitrust law doesn't apply. Mehta is not unfamiliar with Google's legal exposure: he also heard the DOJ's long-running search antitrust case and found that Google violated the law, though the government didn't get the harsh penalties it sought.

The outcome for publishers may hinge on whether they can point to explicit deals or opt-out terms rather than an implicit expectation of traffic. If courts continue to treat free indexing as the baseline of how general search engines work, content owners seeking leverage over AI answers may find formal agreements the more viable path, though this is a reading of the ruling's logic rather than a stated consequence.