Berlin Court: Google AI Overviews Aren't Its Content

A Berlin court has ruled that Google's AI Overviews — the AI-written summaries that now sit atop search results — count as a "new search result format" rather than original content authored by Google. The case was brought by a perfume company that found its protected brand names showing up inside an AI summary right next to cheaper counterfeit products, with links pointing to sites selling the imitations. The court declined to hold Google liable.

The reasoning matters more than the verdict. The court argued that an average user "would recognize that the AI is just aggregating information from other sources," that Google exercises no "decisive influence" over what the summary says, and that the search engine doesn't present those answers as its own statements. On that basis it found neither trademark infringement nor a competition-law violation. In plain terms: if the machine is visibly stitching together other people's content, Berlin says Google isn't the author and isn't on the hook.

Two courts, opposite answers, same week

Here's the problem. Just days earlier, a court in Munich reached the opposite conclusion in a separate case — treating Google's AI summaries as independent content and holding the company liable for false factual claims it made about publishers. So within one week, two German courts looked at essentially the same technology and split: one says an AI Overview is Google talking, the other says it's just a fancy list of links. That contradiction isn't a footnote. It goes to the core question hanging over the entire AI-search business model — when a model confidently states something wrong, or pairs your brand with a knockoff, who answers for it?

For a regular person this is less abstract than it sounds. AI Overviews are what more and more of us now read instead of clicking through to the actual websites. If those summaries can misattribute, mislabel, or quietly route you toward a counterfeit — and no court can agree whether anyone is responsible — then the convenience comes with a quiet asterisk. The same applies if you run any kind of small business: your reputation can be reshaped by a summary you never wrote and can't easily correct.

The honest takeaway is that the law is genuinely unsettled here, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Contradictory rulings like these are how new technology gets its rules — slowly, case by case, until a higher court or a legislature draws the line. Until then, the burden of double-checking quietly sits with the reader.