Google’s AI Overviews have been the subject of an antitrust complaint lodged by the Independent Publishers Alliance with the European Commission, as reported by Reuters.

The complaint accuses Google of “misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers, in the form of traffic, readership, and revenue loss.”

It also asserts that publishers are “unable to opt out” of their material being used in AI summaries unless they are prepared to completely vanish from Google search results.

Google has been incorporating AI-generated summaries at the top of certain web search results for just over a year.

Despite some initial responses that were wildly inaccurate, the feature has continued to expand, and it is now reportedly resulting in significant traffic declines for news publishers.

According to Google, “new AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered” (Reuters).

The company also contended that claims regarding web traffic are frequently predicated on incomplete data and that “sites can experience fluctuations in traffic for a variety of reasons.”