Google faces accountability over AI use of journalism in Brazil

In an unprecedented decision for a Big Tech company in Brazil, Google will have to answer for economic practices that potentially harm journalism in the country.

On Thursday (Apr. 23, 2026), the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), Brazil's main competition regulator, unanimously approved the opening of an administrative proceeding against the search company to investigate the impact of its AI-generated summaries, known as AI Overviews, on Brazilian news outlets.

The central argument is whether Google has been extracting value from Brazilian journalism without adequate compensation — going beyond audience referrals — in what has been called "exploitative abuse of dominant position."

Big Tech companies, including Meta, have faced proceedings at CADE before. In 2025, the regulator and Google reached an agreement over the company's Android practices. In 2023, Google, Meta, and Telegram were investigated for using their platforms to run aggressive campaigns against Bill 2630, known as the Fake News Bill, that was supposed to regulate tech platforms but was never even voted in Congress.

But this is the first time Google, one of the world's largest companies, with 2025 revenue exceeding $400 billion, will be required in Brazil to detail its practices specifically directed at journalism, a sector it has supported through partnerships and grants while upending its business models.

This process started as an CADE inquiry into anticompetitive practices in 2019 to investigate how Google's content scraping of news harmed journalism organizations. AI Overviews was officially launched by the company in May 2024, as part of its efforts — and those of much of the industry, it must be said — to embed generative artificial intelligence into all of its products.

Throughout that lengthy inquiry, Google was required to provide clarifications and information, though many documents remain under procedural secrecy. But the opening of the proceeding signals that CADE's commissioners believe the company needs to do more.

Inquiries and administrative proceedings are different things. An inquiry is an information-gathering phase to determine whether to open a proceeding. An administrative proceeding is launched when the inquiry has found strong evidence of market-harming practices.

Source: CADE's guidelines

One of the measures in the administrative proceedings will be distinguishing between the traditional excerpts shown by Google (known as snippets) and the AI Overviews summaries. Another point to be examined is the zero-click issue, when users simply read a summary and do not click on reference links, cutting off traffic referrals to news outlets — something critically important for journalism.

Perhaps even more pointed will be the attempt to estimate the value Google retains from digital advertising compared to the editorial costs news outlets bear to produce journalism. That is one of the key breakthroughs of this proceeding, it will effectively put numbers on something the company has never disclosed.

Lastly, CADE will require Google to disclose all of its tests — not just the "selective" conclusions that favor its case.

The vote by CADE's commissioner Camila Cabral Pires Alves stressing that the problem is not just about Google's audience referrals to news sites, but also about the "appropriation of value" generated by outlets and unacknowledged by the tech giant.

The central problem is not, at least for now, demonstrating competitive foreclosure in a strong sense. It is examining whether the platform, in a dominant position, unilaterally expands the economic uses of third-party content, single-handedly manages the compensation it returns to them, and captures a disproportionate share of the value generated in that interaction. This exploitation may occur in a non-price environment, through variables such as traffic, visibility, attribution, data, and audience access.

The commissioner clearly lays out her position specifically on AI Overviews:

If the platform begins presenting, within its own interface, a response complete enough to immediately satisfy the user's query, the absence of a click to the source website may represent, even without direct monetary charges, an economically significant displacement of value. This is because the platform retains the user's attention, internalizes informational utility extracted from third-party content, and reduces the possibility that this value can be appropriated, at least in part, by the publisher that produced it.

This value capture, Alves argues, relies not only on the exploitation of audiences lost by outlets, but also on the extraction of informational value from journalistic content itself.

...returning some volume of traffic to publishers is not, in itself, enough to dispel competition concerns. This can coexist with mechanisms of value appropriation, reduction of economic autonomy, and the progressive weakening of conditions for rivalry. The problem, therefore, also reaches the way in which the dominant platform manages the architecture of informational intermediation and transforms third-party content into an input for attention retention, data collection, and the reinforcement of its own coordination power.

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This story was originally published in Portuguese and translated with the help of artificial intelligence, with close review by human editors, according to Nucleo's AI use policy__.__

Report Sérgio Spagnuolo

Artwork Aleksandra Ramos Editing Alexandre Orrico Translation Sofia Costa