18 year old, publicly traded education technology company, Chegg, has sued Google over its AI Overviews and how it has hurt their traffic and revenue. Chegg has "filed a complaint against Google, which has unjustly retained traffic that has historically come to Chegg, impacting our acquisitions, revenue and employees," said Nathan Schultz, CEO of Chegg.
They said, "Unfortunately, traffic is being blocked from ever coming to Chegg because of Google’s AIO and their use of Chegg’s content to keep visitors on their own platform. We retained Goldman Sachs as the financial advisor in connection with our strategic review and Susman Godfrey with respect to our complaint against Google."
Here is more from that statement:
While we made significant headway on our technology, product, and marketing programs, 2024 came with a series of challenges, including the rapid evolution of the content landscape, particularly the rise of Google AIO, which as I previously mentioned, has had a profound impact on Chegg’s traffic, revenue, and workforce. As already mentioned, we are filing a complaint against Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, making three main arguments.First is reciprocal dealing, meaning that Google forces companies like Chegg to supply our proprietary content in order to be included in Google’s search function.
Second is monopoly maintenance, or that Google unfairly exercises its monopoly power within search and other anti-competitive conduct to muscle out companies like Chegg.
And third is unjust enrichment, meaning Google is reaping the financial benefits of Chegg’s content without having to spend a dime.
As we allege in our complaint, Google AIO has transformed Google from a “search engine” into an “answer engine,” displaying AI-generated content sourced from third-party sites like Chegg. Google’s expansion of AIO forces traffic to remain on Google, eliminating the need to go to third-party content source sites. The impact on Chegg’s business is clear. Our non-subscriber traffic plummeted to negative 49% in January 2025, down significantly from the modest 8% decline we reported in Q2 2024.
We believe this isn’t just about Chegg—it’s about students losing access to quality, step-by-step learning in favor of low-quality, unverified AI summaries. It’s about the digital publishing industry. It’s about the future of internet search.
In summary, our complaint challenges Google’s unfair competition, which is unjust, harmful, and unsustainable. While these proceedings are just starting, we believe bringing this lawsuit is both necessary and well-founded.
As you can imagine, this is how a ton of publishers and website owners feel. The AI Overviews and the trend we have seen with Google sending us less and less traffic over time, has been really really upsetting and financially hurtful.
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said, "With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites."
There is no question, most of us see that no one is clicking on links within AI Overviews, in fact, recent studies showed AI Overviews lead to horrible click-through rates.
Case and point:
More about the Chegg lawsuit against Google about AIOs -> Is AI Overview Killing Website Traffic? Chegg’s Legal Battle with Google Explained
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 25, 2025
And Chegg is getting a ton of visibility with some of those queries, ranking well in the AIO, in the Questions & Answers SERP feature, AND… pic.twitter.com/LsGrj3N19c
There is a lot of coverage of this news pulled together on Techmeme.
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