The Independent Publishers Alliance has escalated its fight against Google by filing a formal antitrust complaint with the European Commission, challenging the tech giant's AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results.
The complaint, submitted on June 30, 2025, accuses Google of abusing its dominant market position by using publisher content without consent to create AI Overviews. These summaries appear prominently above traditional search results in over 100 countries, effectively intercepting users before they can click through to original sources.
Data from Similarweb reveals the devastating impact: zero-click searches have jumped from 56% when AI Overviews launched in May 2024 to nearly 69% by May 2025. For some publishers, the effect is even more severe. CBS News saw 75% of searches with AI Overviews result in zero clicks, compared to 54% for their overall search terms. The New York Times has experienced a drop in organic search traffic from 44% three years ago to just 36.5% in April 2025.
"Google's core search engine service is misusing web content for Google's AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers," the alliance stated in its complaint. Publishers argue they face an impossible choice: allow their content to be used in AI summaries or disappear from Google's search results entirely.
The publishers have requested interim measures to prevent what they describe as "serious and irreparable harm to competition and to safeguard access to news" while the broader investigation proceeds. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has received a similar complaint.
Google defends the feature, claiming it "sends billions of clicks to websites daily" and that AI in Search "creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered." However, the timing is particularly challenging for Google, as the European Commission recently found the company failed to comply with the Digital Markets Act by favoring its own services in search results.
This case could establish important precedents for how AI systems use third-party content and whether dominant platforms have special obligations to protect the content ecosystem they depend on.