Berlin ruling limits brand recourse against Google AI Overviews

A Berlin court has handed Google a significant legal shield, and the perfume industry has just learned how thin brand protection is in the age of AI search. The Decoder reports that the Landgericht Berlin ruled Google's AI Overviews constitute a "new search result format" rather than original content, and that Google exercises no "decisive influence" over what they say. A fragrance brand had brought the case after AI Overviews surfaced its trademarked names alongside cheaper imitations, with links directing users toward the knockoffs. The court was unmoved.

The ruling matters well beyond perfume counters.

What the court actually decided

The logic is architectural. By classifying AI Overviews as a format, the Berlin court treats them roughly as it would a ranked list of blue links: Google is the conduit, not the author. The content comes from third-party sources; the model merely reorganises it. On that reading, the brand's grievance lies with the sites being cited, not with the search engine that cited them.

This is a legally convenient fiction, and probably a durable one. AI Overviews do not merely retrieve; they select, synthesise, and present a conclusion. A user who reads that a given fragrance house's scents are interchangeable with a named cheaper alternative has received an editorial judgement, not a list of links to consult. But the court declined to characterise it that way. Unless an appeals court reverses this, or a separate jurisdiction draws a harder line, brands cannot sue their way out of unfavourable AI summaries.

The Munich divergence is worth noting. A separate German court found Google directly liable for factually false AI responses, which sits in real tension with the Berlin decision. The cases differ in their specifics: a false factual claim is easier to frame as defamation than a comparative product presentation. But the inconsistency leaves brands without a clear legal theory. German courts have not yet produced a unified doctrine, and the European Union has not yet tested AI Overviews under the Digital Services Act in any ruling that binds Google's search product.

The visibility consequence

For senior marketers, the ruling clarifies one thing with uncomfortable precision: legal recourse is not a visibility strategy. A brand that appears unfavourably in an AI Overview, whether surrounded by competitors, associated with counterfeits, or simply absent from a generated answer, has no reliable mechanism to force a correction through litigation, at least not in this jurisdiction and not on these facts.

The industries most exposed are those where brand distinction is economically load-bearing. Luxury goods are the obvious case, but the same logic applies to financial services firms whose products get summarised alongside cheaper alternatives, to standards bodies whose technical guidance gets paraphrased in ways that flatten important distinctions, and to industrial groups whose certifications or sustainability claims get collapsed into a generic category answer.

What the perfume company could not achieve in court, a content strategy might. AI Overviews draw from sources Google's systems already trust. A brand that controls the high-authority pages being cited controls, to a meaningful degree, how it appears in the synthesis. That is a narrower form of influence than a legal injunction, but it is currently the only one that demonstrably works.

The Berlin ruling does not close off every legal avenue. A ruling based on "decisive influence" could be revisited if a claimant shows that Google's training choices, retrieval weighting, or prompt-tuning decisions systematically disadvantage a specific brand. That is a harder case to make, and an expensive one to pursue. In the meantime, brands that have invested in earning citations from authoritative sources sit in a structurally better position than those waiting for a court to enforce their preferred summary.

Google has, in effect, received a judicial characterisation it will cite in every future dispute of this kind. Brands that treat that as a surprise have not been paying close attention to how courts have historically treated search algorithms.