Overview
- A Munich Regional Court issued a temporary injunction after finding that Google’s AI Overviews falsely linked two local publishers to scams and other shady practices and that those links did not appear in the cited sources.
- The court concluded the AI Overviews create independent, self-contained assertions in Google’s own words rather than merely listing third-party links, so Google can be held directly responsible for errors the feature produces.
- The plaintiffs first sent Google a cease-and-desist demand and then sued, and the court on May 28 ordered Google to stop repeating the specific false claims and to cover 80 percent of the legal costs.
- Google says it is reviewing the preliminary ruling and that the decision is not final, and the company may appeal while industry observers warn the logic could affect other AI search and chatbot providers.
- The ruling departs from earlier German case law that shielded search engines as conduits and it limits reliance on notice-and-takedown rules or broad host-provider protections, which could raise verification and compliance costs for AI services.