A second German court has held that Google is directly responsible for false claims made by its AI search answers. The Aachen Regional Court barred Google from spreading three disputed text variants produced by AI Mode about a local doctor, in a decision dated September 24, 2026 that The Decoder reported on October 18.
The Aachen judges explicitly followed the reasoning of the Munich Regional Court I, which ruled in late May that AI Overviews are not mere search results but Google’s own statements. Taken together, the two decisions suggest a consistent legal view is now forming across German courts.
Aachen AI Mode Case: A Doctor, A Mix-Up And Invented Criminal Claims
The Aachen case involves a physician who worked as chief physician and professor of neuroradiology in Aachen from 2010 until late June 2026. On August 28, a colleague told him that Google’s AI Mode was explaining his departure with a claim that he had sexually assaulted his secretary, and follow-up searches using terms such as “suspension” and “court proceedings” produced long, detailed stories, complete with an invented legal aftermath.
None of it was about him. According to the court, the AI had taken events tied to a different former university professor and attached them to the doctor, something the court could confirm from its own records because the criminal case had been brought against someone else. Cases like this sit alongside the stranger behaviours already seen in AI search, including the answers to meaningless queries covered in our report on AI Overviews answering gibberish searches.
The doctor explained the mix-up in late August and asked Google by email to remove the content. In mid-September, Google said it would take no action, and a formal legal demand sent the same day also went nowhere, according to the court. The false answers were still live after that, the court said.
Aachen Ruling: Google’s AI Answers Are Its Own Statements
The Aachen court banned further spread of the three disputed text variants on an emergency basis, without hearing Google first, because the false claims could seriously damage the doctor’s professional reputation. If Google violates the order, it faces fines of up to 250,000 euros per violation. Google can challenge the injunction; it is not final.
The legal reasoning is the significant part. “The respondent provides AI-generated search and is therefore also responsible for the answers generated in this context,” the court wrote. Aachen cited Munich directly, noting that Google’s AI produces “independent, new, and substantive statements based on an evaluation and combination of content from various third-party websites.”
The judges also said Google could check such statements, for example by comparing AI output against the source websites it used. Had Google confronted its own AI with the doctor’s objections, the court added, the system would have caught the errors itself. That expectation lands as Google is also reworking how its AI answers link out to sources, covered in our report on Google moving links higher in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Munich AI Overviews Case: Appeal Announced, Settlement Reached
The Munich case, decided in late May, involved two Munich publishers whom Google’s AI had falsely linked to fraud schemes. The Munich judges classified AI Overviews in the same way: as Google’s own statements, not as a neutral display of third-party information.
Google publicly announced an appeal in the Munich case. The Decoder reported on October 18 that the appeal was never carried through to a decision and that the case ended in a settlement instead, meaning no higher court ever weighed in on the Munich reasoning. Whether money changed hands is not known, and neither Google nor the affected publisher would comment.
Aachen is therefore the first time a second court has applied the Munich reasoning to a new claimant and a different Google feature — AI Mode rather than AI Overviews. The wider European framework around these fights is set out in our explainer on the EU AI Act.
Why It Matters
The central entity is Google’s liability for its AI answers, and its key attribute is now consistency: two regional courts, in Munich and Aachen, have treated AI Overviews and AI Mode output as Google’s own content once the company is notified of a false claim and does not act. That connects Google to every neighbour of AI search — the people and businesses described in its answers, who gain a clearer route to an injunction; publishers, whose source pages the courts say Google can check its answers against; and rival answer engines, which operate under the same German reasoning. If the view holds, the legal risk of generating a fresh answer for every query is no longer theoretical in Germany, and fines of up to 250,000 euros per violation give that risk a price.
Background
Google has been adding generative answers to Search since AI Overviews launched, expanding them into AI Mode, a conversational experience that synthesises many websites into a new, standalone answer. That synthesis is what the German courts focused on: because the answer is newly produced by Google’s system, Munich treated it as Google’s own statement, and Aachen has now applied the same logic after a notified complaint went unresolved — a line no higher court has yet tested, because Munich settled before its announced appeal was decided.
Source: The Decoder, October 18, 2026; AI Parabellum, October 18, 2026
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