A court in Germany has decided that Google is directly responsible for false statements made by its AI-generated search overviews. The ruling marks a departure from earlier legal protections that shielded search engine operators from liability.
The Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction ordering Google to stop spreading incorrect claims about two publishers based in Munich. The case number is 26 O 869/26. The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the AI overview counts as the company's own content, not just a list of search results.
Google's AI overviews had incorrectly linked the two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other companies that were genuinely questionable and created connections that did not appear in any of the sources it linked. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but the company did not respond properly.
AI Overviews Treated as Google's Own Content
The court argued that Google's AI overviews work very differently from traditional search results. The AI rewrites and evaluates results in its own words and follows its own structure, the ruling stated. In this case, the overview opened with a confident claim like "Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices" and then built its own structure including a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users.
The court also found that the AI overview made statements that did not appear in any of the search results it referenced. None of the linked sources connected the plaintiffs to the shady companies mentioned by the AI. The court called these the defendant's own statements.
Because Google built the AI and offered it to users, Google owns what the AI produces. The court said Google alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms that drive it.
Search Engine Liability Rules Do Not Apply
The court examined earlier rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice, known as the BGH, which gave traditional search engines and autocomplete limited liability. The BGH had argued that search engine operators were only indirect infringers because they merely made third-party content findable. A duty to proactively check results would threaten how search engines work.
The Munich court found that this reasoning does not apply to AI overviews. A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews create independent, new, and substantive statements by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. Only Google can check those statements, the court noted, at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them.
The court also said that the AI overview is by no means absolutely necessary for using the internet. Traditional search results already help users sort through information, and the AI overview is just an extra feature.
Google's Defense Rejected
At the hearing, Google argued that users could check the linked sources themselves to verify whether the AI summary was correct. The company claimed that users generally know that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted. That is a notable statement given the scale at which Google serves AI overviews. It is also not entirely true, since the connection between sources and generated content is not always visible.
The court rejected this defense. The possibility of disproving a statement through further research does not regularly exempt someone from liability for that statement. The AI overview was understandable on its own and contained a self-contained statement with independently understandable content. It had no reference to other possible interpretations or even unreliable content. Studies show that users almost never click on sources in AI overviews, which supports the court's reasoning.
The court drew a parallel to press law, where publishers are liable for teasers that are understandable on their own, even if readers never read the full article. Google's own argument would also significantly diminish the benefit of the feature if the overview were generally recognized as unreliable.
The court also pointed to a protection gap. If Google were only liable for obvious violations, victims would have no real legal recourse when the AI makes false claims. The third parties whose websites served as sources had not even made the statements in question. So victims could not sue the sources, and under existing rules they could not effectively sue Google either.
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As a result, Google could not invoke host provider protections under the Digital Services Act or fall back on the standard notice-and-take-down process for search engines.
Free Speech Protection Limited
The court also addressed free speech protections for AI-generated content. An AI's opinion is not the expression of an acquired conviction of the person expressing it, but the result of an algorithm, the court wrote.
Offering AI-powered research is above all an expression of Google's business activities and at most a secondary expression of an interest in freely expressing one's opinion and beliefs.
When weighing the plaintiffs' privacy rights against Google's interests, Google had to take a back seat, especially since the challenged statements were based on untrue facts. The AI had linked the plaintiffs to companies that, according to sworn affidavits, had no connection to them whatsoever.
Google Covers Most Legal Costs
The court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs on most counts. It banned claims about scams, connections to dubious companies, subscription traps, phone calls that never happened, and lack of availability. Only two minor requests were denied.
The risk of repeated violations remained, even though the specific texts were no longer being displayed. Google had not issued a cease-and-desist declaration with a penalty clause, and nothing stopped the algorithms from generating the same statements again. Google must cover 80 percent of the legal costs, while the plaintiffs pay 10 percent each.
The ruling may also have international reach, according to the court.
Implications Beyond Google
The Munich ruling goes far beyond this one case. An analysis by AI startup Oumi for the New York Times found that Google's AI Overviews with the current Gemini 3 model answered correctly 91 percent of the time.
That is solid enough for everyday use by most people. But at Google's scale, it still means millions of wrong answers every hour. If enough of that wrong content defames companies or individuals, it could become a serious legal problem not just for Google but for other providers of similar services like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity.
The Oumi analysis also found that 56 percent of the correct Gemini 3 answers could not be backed up by the sources Google linked. The AI gives answers whose origins users cannot trace.
The Munich court tackled exactly this problem. The AI makes its own claims that do not appear in any linked source, and the operator has to answer for them. Whether this reasoning holds up on appeal remains to be seen. Google has not commented on the ruling. But if it gains traction internationally, the fallout could hit not just Google but every AI provider whose systems paraphrase content from the web.
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