Penske Media, owner of Vibe.com, Rolling Stone, Variety, and Billboard, filed a lawsuit against Google over stolen AI content.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in a federal court in Washington, D.C., accused the search giant of scraping content from its publishers for its artificial intelligence (AI) Overviews summaries.
AI Overviews Reduces Website Traffic, Affects Revenue, Says Penske Media
Penske noted that about 20% of Google searches linking to its sites now show AI Overviews. The figure is expected to rise, leading to a significant drop in traffic and affiliate revenue.
“As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC’s best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth,” Jay Penske, chairman, founder and CEO of PMC, said in a statement to Axios.
“Furthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity – all of which is threatened by Google’s current actions.”
Bloggers have long complained that Google’s AI summaries reduces traffic to their sites and affects revenues.
Affected blogs include Vibe magazine (owned by Penske Media), Sandrarose.com, Talkingwithtami.com, Icecreamconvos.com, and more.
Sandrarose.com has seen a 40% drop in traffic recently.
Friend of the blog Tami Reed, owner of Talkingwithtami.com, said her blog’s traffic dropped from 400,000 page views a month to less than 5,000 page views.
Xaviera Bryant (pictured), owner of Icecreamconvos.com, took to YouTube to ask her viewers for help after she lost traffic to her blog.
In an emotional YouTube video titled “I Might Lose Everything,” Xaviera said Google’s reps were “ghosting” her and she only had 30 days left to save her blog.
“It really all began after Google did the ‘Helpful Content Update’ and deemed my website useless,” Xaviera said. She added that Google “basically snatched me out of search engines or either pushed my content so far down in search engines that I no longer got traffic.”
Sandrarose.com, Talkingwithtami.com, and Icecreamconvos.com are partnered with ad network SHE Media, which is owned by Penske Media.
SHE Media operates the websites BlogHer, SheKnows.com, STYLECASTER, Soaps.com and HelloFlo.
SHE Media’s sister brands connect 23 million women around the Internet.
