Publishers battle Google’s devastating AI threat to independent journalism

A major group representing news publishers across Europe filed a complaint on Tuesday against Google, claiming the tech giant is using their articles to power artificial intelligence tools without permission or payment.

The European Publishers Council submitted the formal complaint to European Union authorities on February 10, 2026. The group takes issue with Google’s AI-driven search results, which create automatic summaries of information pulled from news websites. These summaries appear at the top of search pages when users look for information.

Publishers say AI tools threaten journalism’s survival

This legal action could strengthen an existing EU probe that started in late 2025. Regulators are already looking into whether Google is breaking competition rules with these AI features.

The fight centers on a basic question: Should Google be allowed to use content from news sites to train its AI systems and generate answers without paying the publishers who created that content? For years, Google and media companies had a working relationship.

News outlets got visitors from Google searches, and Google benefited from having quality content to point users toward. But publishers say AI summaries are breaking that arrangement.

Christian Van Thillo, who chairs the publishers council, explained the problem in a statement released Tuesday. He said AI search tools threaten independent journalism’s ability to survive.

“It is about stopping a dominant gatekeeper from using its market power to take publishers’ content without consent, without fair compensation, and without giving publishers any realistic way to protect their journalism,” Van Thillo said. He added that “AI Overviews and AI Mode fundamentally undermine the economic compact that has sustained the open web.”

Google rejected the publishers’ arguments. A company representative said the complaint tries to block useful features that people across Europe want to use.

“These inaccurate claims are an attempt to hold back helpful new AI features that Europeans want. We design our AI features to surface great content across the web and we provide easy-to-use controls for them to manage their content,” the spokesperson said.

The search company points to tools it’s developing that would let website owners choose whether their content gets used in AI-generated results. Google says it’s working on technical options for sites to opt out of these features.

But publishers say these controls don’t really help. They argue that blocking Google’s AI tools would hurt their ability to show up in regular search results, cutting off a major source of traffic. Experts describe this as an impossible choice: either let them use your content for AI summaries that reduce clicks to your site, or opt out and become invisible to people searching online.

Complaint strengthens EU investigation into Google

The complaint comes at a bad time for Google’s parent company, Alphabet. It gives European regulators more evidence as they examine whether the company is breaking rules designed to limit powerful tech platforms.

The European Commission launched its investigation in December, stating that the company might be misusing its position as the top search engine to force unfair terms on publishers. The publishers council noted that Google uses its control over online search to access content without paying for it, matching concerns EU antitrust officials have raised.

In February 2026, Teresa Ribera, an Executive Vice-President at the EU, suggested the Commission might take swift action to prevent permanent damage to media companies while the full investigation continues.

The shift Google is making, from sending people to websites toward answering questions directly, poses a serious threat to how news organizations make money. Most publishers rely on advertising revenue from people who visit their sites.

When Google provides complete answers on the search page itself, fewer people click through to read the full article. Even though it includes links in its AI summaries, early data from 2026 shows these citations don’t make up for the lost traffic.

Whatever happens with this complaint could set rules worldwide for how AI companies must pay content creators whose work trains these systems. If EU officials side with the publishers, Google might have to create a payment system similar to one established by a 2019 Copyright Directive, but potentially much more extensive and automatic in how it operates.