France’s Alliance of General Information Press (APIG), representing nearly 300 newspapers, has filed a complaint with the French Competition Authority over Google’s use of news content in artificial intelligence (AI) Overviews and AI Mode.
APIG is asking Google to comply with commitments made in its 2022 agreement with French publishers on neighbouring rights. APIG argued that Google’s AI-generated summaries use press content without prior authorisation or additional compensation and could reduce traffic to original news websites.
Google’s new AI-generated search summaries, which display news information directly in search results without prior authorisation or payment and are estimated by regulators and publishers to have reduced referral traffic to media websites by 33 per cent to 38 per cent, have prompted challenges from French publishers.
Conventional search engines used headlines, links, and snippets to route people to publications. While publishers offered information and depended on the accompanying traffic for subscriptions, advertising revenue, or brand recognition, Google gave visibility and users. This dynamic is altered by AI-generated responses since the platform may integrate data from many sources and provide users with the response directly.
Alliance of General Information Press President Marc Feuillée said publishers are not seeking to halt innovation but want the value of their work to be recognised and compensated in line with the law.
Feuillée stated, “The fact that artificial intelligence is being built on press content says one simple thing: this information has considerable value. Publishers are not asking to stop innovation. They are asking that this value be shared and that the use of their work be compensated, as required by law. In the absence of fair and transparent negotiations, we are taking the matter to the authorities responsible for enforcing the law.”
APIG’s complaint is important because it asks a competition regulator to examine the issue rather than treat it solely as a copyright matter. Copyright law focuses on rights over protected works, while competition law can assess whether a dominant company is using its market position in ways that disadvantage business partners or competitors.
France’s Competition Authority has previously intervened in the relationship between Google and publishers. In March 2024, the authority fined Google €250 million ($576.8 million) for failing to comply with certain commitments related to neighbouring rights and its dealings with press publishers and agencies.
APIG argued that AI may involve a new use of press content that was not considered when Google’s earlier commitments were negotiated. If authorities decide existing commitments apply to AI-generated summaries, Google could face pressure to change how it uses publisher content, negotiate additional compensation, or offer stronger consent and control mechanisms. If the authority takes a narrower view, publishers may have to pursue other legal or commercial options.
Google AI Overviews change how people use search. Instead of seeing a page primarily filled with links and short snippets, users may receive a generated answer that directly addresses the question. For someone looking up a current event, an AI summary can combine information from several news organisations into a few paragraphs. While that can make information easier to access, publishers worry it may reduce the need for users to click through to sources. This concern is often referred to as zero-click search, where a search engine meets a user’s information needs without requiring a visit to the source website.
For publishers, clicks are more than a traffic metric. A visitor to a publisher’s website may see advertisements, sign up for a newsletter, encounter a subscription offer, read additional stories, or later become a paying subscriber. If that visit does not happen, those opportunities can be lost.
The 2026 study “Impact of AI Search Summaries on Website Traffic: Evidence from Google AI Overviews and Wikipedia” by Khosravi and Yoganarasimhan found evidence that suggested AI Overviews would reduce the number of visits to informational websites. The authors estimated the impact of AI Overviews using more than 161,000 article-language pairings and came to the conclusion that it might cause a 15 per cent decrease in Wikipedia traffic to English articles.
The inquiry, which was started by the European Commission in December 2025, considers France’s situation in light of other European-wide concerns. The European Commission stated that they were conducting an investigation to determine whether Google’s use of publishers’ and YouTube’s content due to AI activities violated any EU competition laws.
It is now up to France’s Competition Authority to determine if APIG’s complaint calls for regulatory action. The regulator might look at how Google’s AI Overviews connect to its previous pledges, evaluate whether the feature impacts publishers’ ability to compete, and determine whether Google’s actions hurt businesses that depend on search traffic.
