German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

A German court has ruled that Google is directly liable for what its AI search overviews say. The Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26).

The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the AI overview is Google's own content, not just a list of search results — and previous case law shielding search engine operators does not apply to it.

Why the court found Google directly liable

The overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps and shady business practices for certain queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely dubious companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that appeared in none of the linked sources. The publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter, but Google did not respond appropriately.

The court argued that the AI rewrites and judges results "in its own words and according to its own structure," opening with confident claims such as "Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices." It found the overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results," calling them "the defendant's own statements." Google built the AI and offers it to users, so it owns what it produces, the ruling says, because it alone influences the offering and the algorithms behind it.

Search engine liability rules do not apply

The court also examined rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice, which gave traditional search engines and autocomplete only limited liability as indirect infringers because they merely make third-party content findable. The Munich court found that reasoning inapplicable: a regular search engine points to outside websites, while AI overviews generate "independent, new, and substantive statements." Only Google can check those statements, it said, and the AI overview is "by no means absolutely necessary" for using the internet.

Free speech, costs and scale

The court also addressed free speech protection for AI output, writing that an AI's opinion is "not the expression of an acquired conviction of the persons expressing it, but the result of an algorithm." Offering AI-powered research is "above all an expression of Google's business activities" and "at most a secondary expression" of a free-speech interest. Google covers 80 percent of the legal costs; the plaintiffs pay 10 percent each.

The ruling lands as accuracy questions grow. 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 — at Google's scale still millions of wrong answers every hour — and that 56 percent of the correct answers could not be backed up by the sources Google linked.