Italy’s News Outlets Urge Investigation of Google’s AI Overviews Feature

At a Glance:

• Italy’s publisher group FIEG has formally asked Agcom to investigate Google’s AI Overviews.

• Publishers argue the summaries depress clicks and threaten the economics of news.

• Google says clicks from Search are stable and of higher quality.

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Italy’s main newspaper association has escalated a growing European fight over AI in search. The Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FIEG) has filed a complaint urging the country’s communications regulator, Agcom, to investigate Google’s AI Overviews, the feature that places AI-generated summaries at the top of results. The group says the summaries undercut original reporting by reducing referrals to news sites.

Publishers frame the dispute as both commercial and civic. FIEG argues that fewer click-throughs mean less advertising revenue, thinner margins and fewer resources for public-interest journalism. In its language that has ricocheted around European media circles, FIEG says “Google is becoming a traffic killer.”

“Google is becoming a traffic killer.”

The complaint also points beyond Italy. It references EU rules and enforcement and follows a summer of challenges to AI Overviews at the European level. Earlier this year France’s competition watchdog fined Google €250 million in a related row over use of publisher content to train its AI systems, highlighting regulators’ willingness to wade into the media–tech power balance. Reuters covered that decision here

Google rejects the allegation that AI Overviews are starving the web of traffic. In an August update, the company said “total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year over year,” and that it is sending “slightly more quality clicks” than a year ago. Those lines sketch Google’s central defence while leaving site-level numbers undisclosed

"total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year over year"

Evidence cited by publishers points the other way. Industry analyses referenced in FIEG’s filing claim significant declines when an Overview appears above the blue links. Some studies describe double-digit drops and sharper falls for pages pushed below the AI box. While methodologies vary, the direction of travel in these reports explains why newsrooms are lobbying for regulatory scrutiny.

What could Agcom do next? The regulator could open a formal inquiry, seek data on the frequency of Overviews in news-related queries, examine sourcing and attribution, and coordinate with EU counterparts under the Digital Services Act’s systemic-risk framework. Even without immediate sanctions, the process could pressure Google to tweak how often the feature appears, how it cites sources and how prominently outbound links are displayed.

For Italian publishers, the stakes are high. They argue that visibility, discoverability and revenue are all at risk if answers stay on Google’s page rather than flowing to the outlets that fund reporting. As FIEG puts it, “the reduction in traffic has serious consequences for the sustainability and diversity of the media.” Whether Agcom validates that claim, or accepts Google’s position that overall clicks are holding up, will shape how AI is allowed to sit atop European search results in the months ahead

“the reduction in traffic has serious consequences for the sustainability and diversity of the media.”

Sources: The Guardian’s report on the FIEG complaint and Reuters’ coverage of the French antitrust fine provide wider context on Europe’s AI and media enforcement landscape.