The papers say Google switched the summaries on without their consent, in breach of a 2022 accord under which the company agreed to pay French media groups — and they want the regulator to enforce it.
APIG, a federation of nearly 300 French newspapers, lodged a case earlier this week before France's competition regulator over the AI-generated summaries Google has begun placing above its search results, saying it fears the tool will shrink the flow of visitors to news sites even further.
Google launched the feature, AI Overviews, in France in late July. The summaries appear above the regular search links and pull information from a wide range of sources. The newspapers allege the company switched them on without their permission, and that doing so breached the accord struck in 2022.
Under that accord, Google undertook to pay French media groups, and what APIG asks of the regulator is that the company be held to those promises. The accord has been enforced before: the same authority fined Google €250 million ($290 million) in 2024 over breaches of some of its provisions.
Marc Feuillee, who chairs APIG and is managing director of Le Figaro, said in a written statement that information carries considerable worth. The association added in the same statement that editors have no wish to stand in the way of innovation; what they want is for the worth of what they produce to be shared with them, and paid for when it is used.
Critics argue the summaries feed on journalism while cutting the visits that reach the original stories, since a large share of readers no longer click back to the source.
Google says the summaries let people put more complex questions, point readers to material they would not otherwise have found, and give publishers a way to manage what they put out.
The filing adds to a run of moves by news organisations objecting to how the American technology company draws on their journalism and other material. Revenue across much of the news business has been falling for the past two decades, with advertising shifting ever further onto the internet, a space where technology companies collect much of the profit.
The French case is not the only proceeding touching how Google uses published material. The EU said in December 2025 that it had opened an inquiry into whether the company broke competition law by taking material news outlets and other publishers had posted on the web, feeding it into AI services and delivering those services without paying properly for it.