Chegg is sort of on its last dying breath at this point, but it will go out fighting. The online education company, which started out renting textbooks and later expanded into online homework help, sued Google on Monday for anticompetitive practices, saying it is unfairly scraping material from Chegg for its AI-powered search results.
The lawsuit is not anything groundbreaking or novel—Google has been attacked over the years by the likes of Yelp over claims it uses its search dominance to copy its products and keep users on its own website. Chegg argues that by scraping websites and surfacing snippets directly in the search results page, Google is killing demand for original content and eroding the financial incentives for companies like Chegg to actually invest in producing the material that powers AI programs.
While big tech companies have lined up in support of President Trump, some of the new administration remains skeptical of the industry, so it is not a guarantee that Google will be able to dodge the case. Though, it is notable that Chegg’s stock is down 30% the day after the lawsuit was filed.
Google and others in tech have argued their use of others’ material in chatbots is fair use because they are transforming the content significantly. And they say new tools like AI-powered summaries do not reduce traffic to third-party sites because they can help users find the information they want faster; people will always want to dive in deeper when they find something of interest. But with a website like Chegg that can provide straightforward answers to math problems to lazy students, it seems users could simply copy-paste the response from Google and move on.
Chegg has had a rollercoaster of a ride since 2020. Besides textbook rentals, the company offers the ability to seek homework help from a group of online experts, and demand for its services immediately skyrocketed at the onslaught of the pandemic. The return to classroom instruction and the launch of ChatGPT reversed all those gains, however. Chegg’s stock is trading at just $1 per share today, down from a peak of $113 in 2021 after shedding hundreds of thousands of subscribers in 2024.
The company, by suing Google for scraping websites to use in chatbots, does have a point that the tech giant is supporting the dead internet theory, the idea that the internet is being overrun by bot activity and automatically generated content (see: Facebook, YouTube AI slop). Chegg itself has rushed to compete with its own AI-assisted answers, and users on forums like Reddit have alleged the provided solutions are regularly not correct. In a sense, companies like Google are to blame for that. Chegg had to do something to try and keep up, but its answers are hard to trust at this point (besides the vetted textbook solutions).
Other websites like StackOverflow, a Q&A website for programmers, have similarly been hollowed out by the advent of chatbots. Something that is overlooked about using a site like StackOverflow is that struggling through problems helps one gain foundational knowledge more than getting an answer returned immediately with no reasoning. StackOverflow requires one to read multiple expert discussions to get the full picture. It is slower, but one comes out better understanding not just the solution to a problem but why it worked. Chegg has said it wants to target “curious learners” with more comprehensive and vetted answers, assisted of course, by AI.
Chegg might not be the most sympathetic character, but there is real concern about what tools like Google’s AI summaries are doing to the internet if websites like theirs and StackOverflow cannot survive and produce the detailed, step-by-step knowledge that supports AI models in the first place. Unfortunately, it seems like many consumers do not care, however, and will accept Google’s AI answers out of sheer laziness even if they are aware it is prone to making errors.