French publishers have escalated their dispute with Google over AI search, asking France’s competition watchdog to decide whether AI Overviews and AI Mode require separate licensing negotiations. The Alliance de la Presse d’Information Générale, or APIG, filed the complaint on Aug. 11.
Google launched both features in France on July 22. APIG argues the rollout conflicts with commitments requiring Google to negotiate separately over new services, putting the treatment of publisher content in generative search back before French regulators.
The complaint joins other legal and regulatory challenges surrounding AI Overviews, including disputes over publisher compensation and responsibility for generated answers. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode help users explore complex questions while continuing to provide links to websites.
Google’s publisher commitments face an AI test
France adopted a related-rights law in 2019 that gave press publishers and news agencies protections over certain digital uses of their content. The Competition Authority ordered Google in 2020 to negotiate with publishers in good faith and fined it €500 million the following year for failing to comply with those interim measures.
In June 2022, the Authority made Google’s publisher commitments legally binding. They require good-faith negotiations based on transparent, objective and nondiscriminatory criteria, with a remuneration proposal due within three months of the start of negotiations.
The commitments also require separate negotiations over Google Showcase or any other new Google service, apart from existing uses of protected press content. APIG argues AI Overviews and AI Mode fall under that provision.
Generative AI has already figured into enforcement of the agreement. In March 2024, the Authority fined Google €250 million after finding, among other violations, that Bard, now Gemini, had used publisher and news-agency content to train its foundation model without adequately informing them. The regulator also said it had not determined whether AI uses of press publications fall within France’s related-rights protections.
Publisher controls remain disputed
APIG says Google introduced its AI search features without first opening a separate negotiation with publishers. The complaint follows concern that Google’s AI search expansion could reduce publisher visibility as generated answers occupy more of the search experience.
Google says a Search Console control available in France lets site owners exclude content from generative AI search features without using that decision as a ranking signal for conventional search results.
Pressure over AI content use extends beyond France. The European Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation in December 2025 into whether Google imposes unfair terms on publishers whose content is used for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Separately, publishers have sued Google over Gemini training, alleging existing agreements did not authorize the use of copyrighted works to train its AI models.
The French authority has not announced how it will respond to APIG’s complaint. Any eventual ruling could help determine whether generative search becomes a separate licensing channel or remains part of the long-standing exchange of publisher content for search visibility and traffic.
Read more: Similar tensions are emerging outside traditional news publishing as Reddit reportedly reconsiders parts of its Google AI partnership while AI search changes how users reach source websites.
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