Google’s antitrust ruling confirms AI assistants are the new gatekeepers

Predicting the future can be fun, but you get the sense Judge Amit Mehta wasn’t having much of it in his ruling that declared the long-awaited remedies in the Google antitrust case. Although the case centered around how Google achieved its dominance in search over the past 20 years, Mehta also considered what’s to come, specifically the emergence of AI chatbots like Gemini as go-to information portals for large numbers of people.

That’s important, especially to people in the media, many of whom were disappointed that the remedies weren’t harsher. While Mehta discarded industry-altering solutions like forcing Google to sell Chrome or Android, the ruling does recognize AI assistants as core distribution infrastructure in the media ecosystem. They may be a different animal from search engines, but Mehta writes that there’s enough overlap that the courts should regard them similarly: “…the use cases for GSEs [General Search Engines] and GenAI chatbots ‘are not identical but they do overlap in a number of places’ like ‘a Venn diagram’.”

That recognition is a significant step toward building a future AI ecosystem that works for everyone. There are of course myriad lawsuits and licensing deals between media companies and AI companies, and the ruling is a signal that the courts will treat AI assistants as critical distribution channels on par with browsers and search defaults.

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Exactly what form that takes is far from clear, but something else is: publishers need to build for that future now. AI isn’t an add-on or a feature. Flawed as they may still be, AI portals are the new battleground for where the best information providers will duke it out, just like SEO used to be. There are different rules for AI answer engines (governed by GEO, or generative engine optimization), but the fundamental game—being the source that gets cited—is the same.

The shift from clicks to citations

As AI engines grow in popularity, there’s been a parallel trend of declining search traffic. This was entirely expected, but reports from both Pew Research and Similarweb have put numbers on that uncomfortable and rapidly accelerating reality. In addition, TollBit’s most recent State of the Bots report showed the meteoric rise in AI scraping as well as the abysmal click-through rates from AI summaries.

All of this has sent the media world in a panic since a great deal of the industry’s business model depends on that click-through traffic on search engines to fuel ad impressions. The understandable focus on revenue, however, overlooks the less tangible benefits of ranking in search: brand visibility and authority benefit from prominent placement in search results—both for publications and individuals.

That same logic carries over into AI answers. Although click-through is borderline negligible, users do often see the source that’s being cited, even if it’s just a publication name in a footnote. It’s like being quoted on the evening news—even if you weren’t able to directly monetize the mention, it reinforces your credibility. In other words, the impression (meant both literally and figuratively) still matters.

If your publication is cited in AI answers repeatedly, that can drive demand indirectly. Seeing the same name repeatedly in authoritative answers can influence whether that user decides to subscribe, recommend a source, or follow a journalist or outlet. It’s a softer conversion path than direct clicks but not meaningless—akin to share-of-voice in traditional media measurement.

The hidden value of AI summaries

This isn’t to say such intangibles make up for lost revenue from referral traffic. But they do help publishers answer the question, “Why would you want to?” when considering whether they should compete for placement in AI summaries. And it’s not like monetization is out of the question: larger publications continue to sign licensing deals with AI companies, Perplexity is architecting a revenue-sharing system, and pay-per-crawl programs from the likes of Cloudflare continue to grow. 

In fact, seeking placement in AI answers and measuring success will be key data for any publication when the time comes to negotiate with AI companies on licensing. And there’s every chance that court rulings could force the issue in the future, especially now that Judge Mehta has established the importance of AI information portals. 

And let’s be real: If you choose to opt out or ignore AI summaries, someone else is going to be cited. As users often don’t just read answers, but copy them and even use them in their own documents and web pages (Perplexity even provides a button for this), that could have a compounding effect as at least some of that material ends up in data for AI training and web crawling. Since AI answers rely on citations more than links, it could be difficult to unseat a competitor once they secure a popular summary.

The other shift the ruling underscores is that, in an AI-mediated world, discovery isn’t a single-platform game. The decision requires Google to share data with its rivals. And with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot all pushing aggressively into AI answers, publishers will need to think beyond “optimizing for Google.” That means monitoring how content surfaces across various AI gateways, each with different rules for visibility. Just as SEO once became a core newsroom discipline, the coming challenge will be multi-engine optimization—treating AI portals as the front doors for audiences they are rather than optional experiments.

The AI-first discovery era begins

Many were hoping the Google ruling would rebalance the power between Google and publishers. While that mostly didn’t happen, it did create a clear signal that AI engines will be the next frontier where content will compete for attention. The rewards for publishers are less tangible, at least for the time being, but there are rewards. And they beat the penalty: disappearing from discovery altogether.

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