Google AI Overviews win in Berlin: court says they’re a search format

Google just picked up an important court win in Berlin over Google AI Overviews. The judges said these AI-generated summaries count as a search-results format, not as content Google itself has published.

The Berlin court said Google doesn’t have “decisive influence” over the exact wording, and that users can recognize the Overviews as compiled summaries built from third-party sources. That weakened a perfume maker’s claim that its brands were showing up alongside cheaper knockoffs and links to competing sellers.

Berlin also breaks from what happened in Munich. There, two publishers were wrongly tied to scams and fraudulent business practices. The Munich court found that the summaries contained independent, new, and substantive statements, and it issued a temporary injunction.

So Germany now has a real split on this question: are these outputs just aggregation, or are they generation? If you follow AI search, this one matters. Any wider move toward treating these answers as Google’s own statements would leave the company more exposed when the summaries are false, misleading, or commercially damaging.

The Munich decision isn’t final, and Google is expected to appeal. It’s also already dealing with wider pressure in Europe, including an antitrust complaint from the European Publishers Council and a separate copyright dispute connected to Hungary over the reuse of journalistic content. For now, though, the Berlin ruling gives the company some breathing room.