A Judge Just Ruled That Google Never Owed You Traffic. "An Expectation Is Not an Agreement."

Two companies spent a year arguing that Google broke the bargain of the open web. On September 30, a federal judge told them there was no bargain.

Judge Amit Mehta dismissed Penske Media's antitrust case against Google on 30 September, and Chegg's with it, in a 41 page memorandum opinion. The opinion, signed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, grants Google's motions to dismiss in both actions in full.

The sentence that matters to anyone whose funnel starts with a blog post is sixteen words long. "But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works."

That is now the legal status of the deal most course businesses were built on.

The bargain nobody signed

The publishers' theory was simple and, to anyone who has ever published anything online, completely intuitive. For two decades, publishers assumed an unwritten bargain with Google: let its crawler in, and search traffic flows back. AI Overviews, they argued, keep the content while cutting the referrals.

Mehta didn't buy the premise, because nobody ever shook hands. The plaintiffs, he found, "failed to plead any actual agreement whereby Defendants promised to 'sell' Plaintiffs any specific amount of traffic." They alleged no communications from which mutual assent could plausibly be inferred, and no negotiated quantity, duration or exclusivity.

Penske tried the next move: ask the court to infer an implied agreement from twenty years of behavior. Accepting that theory, Mehta reasoned, would mean Google holds agreements with billions of websites. He found it more plausible that publishers simply accepted free crawling.

A "historical course of dealing," he added, would still have to establish essential terms such as price or quantity. Nobody ever agreed on a price for a click, because nobody ever had to.

The tying claim died too. Mehta concluded that Penske had not plausibly alleged that Google Search and AI Overviews are separate products under antitrust law.

The plaintiff this industry should look at twice

Penske owns Rolling Stone and Variety. Interesting, but distant.

Chegg is the one to study. It is an education company whose entire acquisition engine was search. In its complaint, Chegg said it gains most of its subscribers through students searching for answers to study questions on Google, and that it "depends on referrals from Google's monopoly search engine for a large portion of the revenue" it spends producing original content.

That is the same sentence, scaled down, that describes thousands of course businesses. Write the free answer. Rank the free answer. Convert a slice of the people who read the free answer.

Here is what happened when the top of that funnel closed. By January 2025, Chegg's non-subscriber website traffic had already fallen 49% year over year. Two rounds of cuts followed eight months apart: 248 jobs in May 2025, then 388 more in October 2025, alongside the lawsuit against Google and a leadership change. The company's own statement blamed "the new realities of AI and reduced traffic from Google to content publishers."

The bleeding continued into this year. Academic Services revenue fell 61% in the quarter ended June 30, 2026, which Chegg attributed in its 10-Q to lower subscription and advertising revenue "primarily related to reduced traffic which led to fewer subscribers." Q2 2026 revenue came in at $51.8 million, down 51% from $105.1 million a year earlier.

A public company with lawyers, a 101-page complaint and real damages took this argument to the one judge in America who had already ruled against Google. It lost on the pleadings.

The judge agreed it hurts. He just said it isn't his job.

This is the uncomfortable part. Mehta did not say the harm is imaginary.

"The court does not treat Plaintiffs' alleged harms lightly," he wrote. "Nor is it unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in, and the knock-on consequences to journalists, educators, and other online creators whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation."

And then he pointed at the exit. He concluded that antitrust statutes are ill-suited to remedy the disruptions new technology brings, a task he said falls to lawmakers rather than courts. The opinion described the problem as "an issue for Congress [or regulators] to consider."

There is a strange symmetry here. Mehta is the judge who ruled in 2024 that Google unlawfully maintained monopolies in general search and general search text advertising. His finding that Google holds monopoly power did not, by itself, establish that the conduct Chegg and Penske challenged violated antitrust law.

Monopoly, yes. Owed you clicks, no.

What creators actually control

The lever that exists is blunt. Publishers can exclude webpages from being used for AI Overviews, but they will still be listed in traditional search results. Which means the choice is to keep feeding the summary or pull your best material out of the answer box and find out what your rankings look like afterward.

Google, for its part, is adjusting the surface. It made five link improvements to AI Overviews and AI Mode in 2026, including inline links placed earlier in responses. The dismissal also landed two weeks after reports that Google's paid publisher pilot had roughly 100 participants.

So there is a market forming for content inside AI answers. The ruling doesn't decide whether publishers should be paid for AI answers. It decides who sets the price, and in the US, for now, that is Google.

This isn't over, but it isn't close either

Mehta dismissed all five claims without prejudice. In the Penske case the dismissal was without prejudice but final and appealable. It was also the third time Mehta has dismissed similar antitrust claims aimed at Google's AI features, following an earlier dismissal of comparable claims from smaller publishers.

Three swings, three strikes, one judge, one conclusion: if your business plan assumes Google will keep sending the traffic it sent last year, that plan is a hope with a spreadsheet attached.