Chegg, an American educational company, has accused Google of disincentivising original content «in favor of low-quality, unverified AI summaries»—a recent technology that scrapes information from websites and gives it to the user without having to click into a page.
In a lawsuit filed on Monday (via Reuters) Chegg argues Google's AI overview will lead to a «hollowed-out information ecosystem of little use and unworthy of trust».
This announcement coincides with Chegg's declaration of its full-year financial results for 2024, which it put out to the public via a press release.
In that press release, Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz starts with two central announcements on behalf of the company. The first is that Chegg is currently exploring a «range of alternatives to maximize shareholder value, including being acquired, undertaking a go-private transaction, or remaining as a public standalone company».
The second is the filing of its complaint against Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc. Schultz argues these two decisions are directly linked as he alleges Google «has unjustly retained traffic that has historically come to Chegg, impacting our acquisitions, revenue and employees».