Judge dismisses Chegg and Penske antitrust cases against Google

• On 30 September, Judge Amit P. Mehta dismissed separate antitrust lawsuits brought by education company Chegg and Penske Media Corporation with affiliated publishers.
• The publishers alleged Google used its search dominance to obtain their material without payment and that AI answers diverted visitors and revenue from their sites. Those were allegations, not findings.
• The judge found the complaints did not plausibly plead the agreements, market definitions and antitrust standing their claims required.
• The ruling addresses the antitrust claims as pleaded; it does not decide whether Google infringed copyright.

The cases turned on a bargain the publishers said Google had changed. They argued that they supplied material for Google’s search index in return for visitors clicking through to their websites. In their account, Google began using publisher content in search snippets and AI-generated answers, giving people less reason to visit the original sites—and leaving publishers dependent on Google’s search traffic with little practical choice but to keep supplying content.¹

Chegg filed its case in February 2025; Penske Media and affiliated publishers brought theirs separately in September that year. Mehta considered the amended complaints together and granted Google and Alphabet’s motions to dismiss both.¹

The opinion did not find that Google had taken content or diverted traffic as the publishers alleged. It said that, even taking their well-pleaded allegations as true at this stage, the legal claims fell short. The court found no plausibly alleged agreement to support the publishers’ reciprocal-dealing claims. It also rejected Penske’s claim that Google unlawfully tied AI Overviews to its search product, and found problems with the plaintiffs’ antitrust standing and proposed publishing-market claims.¹

The decision also treated the publishers’ unjust-enrichment claims separately: the judge declined to hear those state-law claims after dismissing the federal claims. That was not a ruling on whether Google was unjustly enriched.¹

Mehta acknowledged the wider stakes, writing that the court was not unsympathetic to the position facing publishers, journalists, educators and other creators. But he said antitrust law was not a substitute for legislation addressing economic disruption from innovation. That leaves the underlying dispute over publisher traffic, compensation and control of online material unresolved by these cases.¹²

The opinion says a final, appealable order accompanied it, but gives no deadline for an amended complaint. Federal rules generally allow 30 days to appeal a civil judgment when the United States is not a party. If the appeal period began with an order entered on 30 September, that would ordinarily point to 30 October; certain motions or other rules can change the calculation.¹³

Footnotes

1. Memorandum Opinion, Chegg, Inc. v. Google LLC and Penske Media Corporation v. Google LLC, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, 30 September 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Ars Technica, “Judge dismisses Chegg and Penske antitrust lawsuits targeting Google AI search”, 1 October 2026. ↩

3. Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, U.S. Courts. ↩