One media conglomerate is fighting back against what it views as an illegal use of its reporting by Google.
Penske Media, which owns publications like Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, and Sportico, is suing Google for its use of artificial intelligence in the form of AI summaries that appear atop search results, per a report by Ben Fritz in The Wall Street Journal. Penske claims that these summaries have damaged its businesses by suppressing web traffic, and Google is not properly compensating the company for using its original reporting in said summaries.
“With AI Overviews, people find search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered,” a Google spokesman countered to WSJ. “Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites. We will defend against these meritless claims.”
AI summaries appear atop search results when users query certain topics. While these AI summaries offer links to the source material from which the information came, previous studies have shown that an incredibly small minority of searches that return an AI summary are followed through with a click to the source material. According to a Pew study released over the summer, just 1% of searches that present users with an AI summary end with a click to the source material. That same study found that search results without an AI summary saw users click on a link within the search results nearly twice as often as queries featuring an AI summary.
It’s pretty clear, AI summaries are suppressing web traffic for many publishers. And Penske believes this new reality will have widespread negative impact in media. The company argues that, if AI summaries drive publishers out of business, who then will gather the information necessary for Google’s AI-generated summaries in the first place?
“Siphoning and discouraging user traffic to PMC’s and other publishers’ websites in this manner will have profoundly harmful effects on the overall quality and quantity of the information accessible on the internet,” Penske’s complaint reads.
While there might be no direct tie to sports media in Penske’s lawsuit, this dynamic will impact digital sports publishers all the same as any other content on the internet. Without traffic from Google, digital publications are at risk of going under, giving consumers fewer places to get their sports coverage.
The diminished traffic will hurt niche beats the most. Publications covering less popular or emerging leagues and small-market teams will be the least likely to withstand the downturn in traffic.
How Penske’s lawsuit goes could have a wide-ranging impact on sports media and the digital media industry writ large.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.