A court in the Bavarian capital of Munich ruled on Friday that search engine operator Google can be held directly liable for incorrect answers generated by its “AI overview” feature, drawing a distinction between standard search results and AI summaries.
The legal dispute centered on whether the service should receive the same legal treatment as conventional search results. Judges at the Munich Regional Court I were asked to rule on lawsuits filed by two Munich-based publishing companies.
Google’s overview feature had erroneously linked the companies to dubious business practices, subscription traps and fraudulent schemes, associating them with information about other shady firms and inventing connections that did not exist.
Google argued it was not responsible for the data processing itself and did not adopt the third-party content featured in the overview as its own. The court firmly rejected this argument, ruling that the AI summary does not merely display or link to search results but constitutes distinct content attributable to the search engine operator.
The defense relied on existing case law from the Federal Court of Justice, which protects search engine operators from direct liability for simply listing third-party content. However, the court found this did not apply to Google’s AI tool, as it summarizes results in its own words, evaluates their content, and presents them in a structured format, creating entirely new, independent statements beyond mere links.
The court also rejected Google’s defense that users could verify sources themselves and knew that “AI-generated information should not be trusted blindly.” Judges said the AI overview constituted “a self-contained statement with independently comprehensible content,” with no indication of unreliability given to the reader.
The court ordered Google to stop spreading the false claims and to bear 80% of the legal costs. A Google spokesperson stated the company invests heavily in AI overview quality and will carefully review the ruling, which is not yet final.
Source: www.dw.com