The Independent Publishers Alliance has filed an antitrust complaint against Google with the European Commission, accusing Google of “misusing web content for Google's AI Overviews in Google Search,” Reuters reports.
The group charges that Google is placing its AI Overviews above traditional search results, causing loss of traffic and revenue loss to publishers.
Google counters that it sends vast amounts of traffic to publisher websites.
"New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered," a Google spokesperson told Reuters.
However, the Independent Publisher Alliance continues, "Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google's AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google's general search results page," according to Reuters.
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has also received the complaint.
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