The traffic line in Chegg's Search Console looked like the ones I have had to explain to clients. Not a gradual decline you can blame on competition or seasonality. A cliff. The kind where someone opens their analytics on a Monday morning and goes very quiet before they respond to anything. Chegg's non-subscriber traffic dropped 49 percent by January 2025, a devastating fall from the 8 percent decline reported just months earlier. Revenue fell 24 percent in Q4 year over year. These are not market cycle numbers. These are numbers that mean something structural broke. SEO By Highsoftware99.
Chegg filed its antitrust complaint on the same day it released those results, with their CEO saying directly that traffic was being blocked from ever reaching their site because Google's AI Overviews were using Chegg's content to keep visitors on Google's own platform.
I have watched this dynamic play out across smaller sites for two years. An educational how-to page sits in position three for its target query, gets included in an AI Overview, and sees its click-through rate fall by half. The ranking does not change. The traffic goes to Google. The site owner receives a report showing their keyword positions are stable, and cannot understand why revenue is declining. That gap between ranking and earning is the thing Chegg has now put in front of a federal court.
The complaint accuses Google of three violations under the Sherman Antitrust Act: reciprocal dealing, monopoly maintenance, and unjust enrichment. The core argument is that Google coerces publishers into supplying content to remain indexed in search, then uses that content to generate AI answers without any compensation in return. That is not a copyright argument. That is a structural coercion argument, and those two things require different evidence and survive different legal tests.
Image credit: Screenshot from "Google’s May 2026 Core Update Just Changed SEO & GEO" by Total Authority on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYdLaSv6-SQ).
Here is where the case gets more complicated than the coverage suggests, because something happened in March 2026 that most Chegg write-ups skipped over. A federal judge dismissed a separate antitrust lawsuit brought by news publishers against Google, ruling at the pleading stage that they had not plausibly shown legal standing, monopoly power in the online news market, or a valid tying claim. The court found the publishers' market definition arguments flawed. That case looked coherent from the outside. It did not survive the pleading stage. Chegg's team is operating with that outcome now visible.
Defining the relevant market is everything in antitrust litigation. If Chegg cannot establish with precision where Google holds the monopoly power being exercised against them, the coercion argument collapses before discovery. Chegg's lawsuit explicitly cites the DOJ's 2024 ruling that Google illegally maintained its search monopoly, which gives their complaint stronger footing than publishers who had to establish that monopoly from scratch. Whether that distinction is enough, nobody knows yet. But it matters.
Here is what I got wrong for most of 2024: I told clients that inclusion in AI Overviews was a soft positive for visibility. Getting content cited by Google felt like presence. Then the data showed that only 8 percent of users whose search triggered an AI Overview clicked on a link, compared to 15 percent when no overview appeared. Getting cited without getting the click is worse than not being cited at all if your business runs on traffic. The citation is not compensation. It took me longer than it should have to say that to clients without softening it.
Penske Media's February 2026 antitrust filing put the underlying issue as clearly as anyone has: Google has pivoted from a search engine that sends traffic to websites to an answer engine that removes the incentive for users to click at all, describing this as having shattered the longstanding bargain that allows the open internet to exist.
That language is accurate. The whole content ecosystem was built on an unwritten arrangement: you let Google crawl your work, Google sends you readers. Businesses built hiring plans around it, revenue models, editorial strategies. Chegg is not unique in having done that. Chegg is unique in being a publicly traded company whose collapse under that arrangement became impossible to quietly absorb in a quarterly earnings call.
The case might not win. The March 2026 dismissal showed courts applying a high standard before these cases reach discovery, and Google's legal capacity is substantial. But the downstream pressure is already real. Publishers who spent years quietly absorbing traffic losses are now building off-platform channels: newsletters, apps, paywalled communities, channels they own rather than channels they effectively rent from Google. Not because a lawsuit told them to. Because the lawsuit made plain that no one is coming to restore the old arrangement.
The outcome that matters most here is not a damages figure. It is whether this litigation, combined with regulatory pressure in the EU, forces Google to let publishers opt out of AI Overviews without vanishing from search entirely. Every client I have had to rebuild from scratch after a traffic collapse built their model on a deal they believed was stable. Chegg is trying to establish in court that the deal had terms. That is a different thing from asking for it back.
Waleed Qamar holds a BSc in Computer Science from Purdue University and has spent the years since turning that technical foundation into something the curriculum never covered: figuring out why websites rank, why they fall, and why most businesses never find out until it is too late.
Pakistan-born and based between the United States and South Asia, he has managed search visibility for e-commerce stores, local service businesses, and SaaS startups across two continents. He started in SEO when guest posting still worked, survived the Penguin update, and has rebuilt client sites from scratch after algorithm hits more than once.
He has watched good businesses get sold packages that looked like progress and delivered nothing lasting. He has also seen the right approach quietly double a site’s traffic without a single press release about it.
His writing on SEO By Highsoftware99 covers Google algorithm updates, autocomplete optimization, semantic SEO structure, and the widening gap between what agencies promise and what Google actually rewards in 2026.
He knows what a traffic cliff looks like in Search Console on the morning you discover it.
