Generative AI: The Emerging Focus of Antitrust Scrutiny Against Big Tech

For decades, Google’s dominance in online advertising and search has attracted scrutiny from regulators and publishers alike. But while billion-dollar fines and antitrust lawsuits have chipped away at its ad-tech empire, the next battleground is taking shape elsewhere: generative AI.

Unlike traditional search results that link users to websites, generative AI features like Google’s “AI Overviews” answer questions directly on the search page. To the average user, it’s a convenient shortcut. To publishers, it’s an existential threat.

In the old search model, traffic flowed from Google to publishers. More clicks meant more ad revenue. Today, zero-click searches—where users get what they need without leaving Google—have become the norm. Generative AI amplifies this trend by summarizing answers directly from publisher content, with no guarantee of credit, compensation, or even a visit to the source site.

Recent reports show that for many news outlets, more than two-thirds of their Google search impressions now end in zero clicks. As AI-generated answers proliferate, this number is set to climb. For publishers already navigating razor-thin margins, the loss of referral traffic isn’t just inconvenient—it’s catastrophic.

While Google’s ad-tech monopoly has been the focus of U.S. and EU antitrust cases for years, fresh complaints are now surfacing that target how generative AI rewrites the rules. European publishers recently filed a formal complaint, arguing that AI Overviews abuse market power by extracting and repackaging content without consent.

In the U.S., academic publishers and even educational companies like Chegg have accused Google of using AI to divert traffic—and revenue—from their platforms. These aren’t isolated gripes; they’re the early warning signs of a new wave of litigation that could reshape how AI interacts with copyrighted material.

Google insists that AI Overviews are meant to help users find information faster and that they still drive valuable traffic to quality content. But for many publishers, there’s no meaningful opt-out—no clear way to say, “Don’t train on my content, and don’t summarize it for free.”

The asymmetry is glaring: Google trains its AI on billions of pages of human-created work while retaining near-total control over who profits from the summaries. Small and mid-sized publishers, already dwarfed by Big Tech, now face the prospect of fighting billion-dollar AI systems with scant legal protections.

The generative AI moment poses urgent questions for lawmakers, regulators, and society at large. Should there be mandatory opt-outs? Compensation schemes for training data? Transparency rules for how AI summarizes and credits sources? Or will regulators watch, as they did in the early days of ad-tech, while a handful of companies entrench dominance in the name of “innovation”?

If publishers have learned anything from past battles over search and ads, it’s that waiting for help isn’t a strategy. For many, the fight over generative AI isn’t just about clicks or copyrights—it’s about survival in an ecosystem increasingly stacked against them.

The question now isn’t whether AI will change the balance of power online. It already has. The only question is whether anyone can hold Big Tech to account before it’s too late.