Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

• "In the past, AI firms have hoped that disclaimers warning about misinformation would protect them from lawsuits over untrustworthy outputs. Last year, one chatbot maker even argued that AI speech is its own category of “pure speech” and the First Amendment should protect it."
  
  

• AI is not necessary to search the web
  
  Historically, any potentially harmful content surfaced by search engines has been protected from direct liability because that surfacing was considered largely unavoidable when helping users sort through an enormous tangle of information online. But the German court emphasized that AI search engines do not enjoy those same protections because AI summaries merely provide “an additional function—one without which the use of the search engine would still be (and is) possible, and without which users are perfectly capable of finding results amidst the ‘flood of data.’”
  
  In other words, nobody needs AI to search the Internet, so AI firms can’t just let their tools attribute false claims to fake sources without assuming any liability.
  
  
  
• Update, June 11, 2026:
  
  Google has provided us with a statement on the ruling. The company says its AI overviews are designed to "reflect" information that already exists on the web.
  
  "We invest deeply in the quality of AI Overviews to ensure that the overwhelming majority of responses provide accurate information, and they are designed to reflect the information that exists on the web. We’re carefully reviewing this decision, which is not yet final," a Google spokesperson said.
  
  Google adds that AI overviews can occasionally miss context or misinterpret web content, just like traditional search results. But that's exactly where the Munich ruling disagrees. The court draws a line between AI overviews, which generate new content loosely based on sources, and traditional search results, which list sources with direct quotes. That distinction is what makes Google directly liable, according to the court. In its statement, Google also repeats the very argument the court dismissed, that "people can dig deeper and verify."

 

Funny thing is that the ai was trained from books, so you do not need the internet to search for informations either.

 

It seems like an unnecessary case. What purpose does it serve?

Mis/dis/mal/information is as old as time, as is discernment.