A group representing nearly 300 French newspapers has filed a complaint against Google. The complaint went to France's Competition Authority this week.
The group is called Apig, short for Alliance de la presse d'information générale. It speaks for many of the country's largest news outlets.
The complaint centers on a feature called AI Overviews. Google rolled this out across France at the end of July.
AI Overviews shows an AI-written summary above the usual search links. It pulls information from many websites at once.
Publishers worry this stops readers from clicking through to their sites. If the summary already answers the question, there is less reason to visit the original article.
The 2022 Agreement
Back in 2022, Google signed deals with 450 French publishers. These deals covered what is known as neighboring rights under copyright law.
Neighboring rights require tech companies to pay news outlets when their content gets used. The 2022 agreements were meant to set that payment structure.
Apig argues that Google rolled out AI Overviews without getting fresh consent from publishers. The group says this breaks the terms of that earlier deal.
This is not the first clash between Google and French regulators. In 2024, the Competition Authority fined Google 250 million euros for failing to follow parts of the 2022 agreement.
Google's Response
Google has responded to the complaint. The company says it reworked its payment system to account for how content appears inside AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Google also says publishers have a choice. Website owners can decide whether their content shows up in these AI search features at all.
Despite that, the numbers raised by regulators are hard to ignore. Arcom, France's audiovisual and digital watchdog, estimates AI summaries cause a traffic drop of between 33% and 38%.
Marc Feuillée, president of Apig and head of Le Figaro, spoke about the value of original reporting. He said publishers are not against new technology, but want fair payment for the work AI tools rely on.
The financial pressure on newspapers has been building for years. Advertising money has shifted online, and much of that money now goes to large tech platforms instead of news organizations.
Critics say AI summaries add to that pressure. Fewer clicks mean less ad revenue for the outlets that produced the original reporting.
This dispute is part of a larger pattern across Europe. In December 2025, the European Union opened an investigation into whether Google broke competition rules by using publisher content to train and power its AI systems without proper payment.
The French complaint adds another layer to that ongoing scrutiny. For now, Apig is asking regulators to force Google to stick to the terms it agreed to in 2022, rather than changing the rules on its own.
