How Will Legal Challenges Shape AI Citation Practices?

What changed in Penske v. Google?

Penske Media, the parent company behind Rolling Stone, Variety, and Billboard, sued Google in September 2025 over AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that sit above Google's organic search results. The suit argues that Google uses its dominant position in search to pull publisher content into those summaries, then keeps the reader on Google's page instead of sending the visit to the source. Google's defense rests on two claims: that AI Overviews is a product improvement, and that publishers who object can opt out.

Reporting on the case describes publishers disputing that second claim. They argue that opting out costs more visibility than staying in, because pulling a page out of AI Overviews is tangled up with pulling it out of ordinary search results too. That dispute sat at the center of a hearing on August 26, 2026, on Google's motion to dismiss the case.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta pressed Google's lawyers hard. He said the arrangement 'seems really unfair' to publishers and told Google that product improvements 'are not immune from antitrust scrutiny,' according to Search Engine Journal's account of the hearing. He also asked, more pointedly, whether Google was building its AI products 'on the backs of the publishers.' None of that is a ruling. Mehta had not decided whether Penske's case survives the motion to dismiss as of the hearing, and Google has not lost this round.

The identity of the judge raises the stakes further. Mehta is the same judge who ruled in 2024 that Google's search business is an illegal monopoly, a decision that reshaped how regulators and publishers think about Google's leverage. A judge who has already found monopoly power in Google's core search business brings a different starting point to a case about how that business uses AI to answer queries instead of sending clicks.

Who does this reach beyond one publisher?

Penske is not litigating alone. Chegg has a related case against Google over AI Overviews, and both cases reached a decision point in front of Judge Mehta around the same August 2026 hearing, according to SERPary's reporting on the dismissal arguments. Two plaintiffs from different industries, media publishing and online education, making a similar argument against the same defendant signals that the underlying complaint is not unique to entertainment journalism. It is a claim about how AI Overviews treats any content it summarizes: extract it, answer with it, and route the visit to Google instead of the source.

That pattern reaches well past two named plaintiffs. Any brand or publisher whose pages get pulled into an AI Overview, a ChatGPT answer, or a Perplexity summary faces the same trade: visibility inside the answer, but no guaranteed visit to the site. B2B SaaS teams competing on 'best [category] tool' prompts and local or service businesses competing on '[service] in [city]' prompts are watching the same dynamic play out on smaller stages. Every engine that summarizes instead of links runs on the same content and raises the same fairness question, not just Google's.

What does the before-and-after data show?

The clearest before-and-after evidence in this fight is click data, not a legal filing, and it comes from Ahrefs, which has measured the same thing twice. In April 2025, Ahrefs compared Google Search Console data from before and after AI Overviews rolled out in the United States and found a 34.5 percent lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking result on searches where an AI Overview appeared. In February 2026, Ahrefs ran the comparison again using December 2025 data across 300,000 keywords, half with AI Overviews present and half without. The gap had widened to 58 percent.

Line those two numbers up against the legal timeline and the pattern is hard to miss. Penske filed suit in September 2025, between the two Ahrefs measurements. By the time Judge Mehta heard arguments in August 2026, the click-through damage Ahrefs measured had gotten worse, not better, while the antitrust case built on that same damage was still waiting on a ruling.

How should you respond before the ruling lands?

The right response does not wait for Judge Mehta's ruling: start competing for the citation now, not just the click. Litigation runs on a timeline measured in years, and even a Penske win would likely produce a licensing framework or a disclosure requirement, not a return to the click-through rates publishers had in 2024.

Four moves make sense regardless of how the case ends.

1. Track Citation Share, the percentage of relevant AI answers in your category that name you, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews, not Google alone.
2. Publish content specific enough for an answer engine to quote: named numbers, dated sources, and real comparisons instead of generic copy.
3. Weigh whether opting a page out of AI Overviews costs more in ordinary search visibility than it saves in unattributed summaries.
4. Re-check the click-through numbers after each Ahrefs update instead of assuming the gap has stabilized.

What happens next?

Judge Mehta had not ruled on Google's motion to dismiss as of the August 26, 2026 hearing. Three outcomes are on the table. He could dismiss Penske's claims and leave AI Overviews as-is. He could let the case proceed to discovery, which would force Google to produce internal data on how AI Overviews affects publisher traffic and revenue, the kind of evidence that shaped his 2024 monopoly ruling. Or the parties could settle, most likely on licensing or attribution terms that other publishers would then use as a template.

Whichever way it breaks, the ruling will not arrive fast enough to help a publisher or brand losing citation share today. Treat the hearing as a signal, not a solution: the legal system has started asking the question publishers have been asking since 2024, but the answer engines keep answering queries in the meantime.

Sources

Source: Search Engine Journal

Judge Amit Mehta said the AI Overviews arrangement 'seems really unfair' to publishers and that product improvements 'are not immune from antitrust scrutiny' Search Engine Journal, 2026-08-26

Source: SERPary

Chegg's related case against Google over AI Overviews reached a dismissal hearing before Judge Mehta around the same time as Penske's SERPary, 2026-08-26

Source: Ahrefs

AI Overviews correlated with a 34.5% lower average click-through rate for top-ranking pages Ahrefs, 2025-04-17

Source: Ahrefs

A follow-up study using December 2025 data found AI Overviews correlated with a 58% lower average click-through rate for top-ranking pages Ahrefs, 2026-02-04

Source: Axios

Penske Media filed its antitrust lawsuit against Google over AI Overviews' use of publisher content Axios, 2025-09-14

Source: CourtListener

Case docket: Penske Media Corporation v. Google LLC, No. 1:25-cv-03192 CourtListener, 2025-09-14