This was my thought as well. Merely citing the material isn’t necessarily a problem on its own.

The nature of the citation and how that impacts the paper doing the citing would need to be examined to form a meaningful opinion about Google’s behavior here.

You are right but the implication was that the citations were not rebuttals.

Then the answer is that even papers that don't meet the "high" standard that every organization and journal likes to think they hold themselves to when publishing, still contain relevant data and explanations that are citable.

Although let's be clear... this is bureaucratic issue. Some journals only publish English language papers. No matter how impactful your paper is, they'll never publish it if you wrote it in Tamil. Google only publishes papers that doesn't directly insult them, and spread fear about their own proprietary technology while providing no clear solutions. The paper may be brilliant but they definitely won't put their money and name behind it.

Since they (Google) are ideologically opposed to the paper's findings, I can't imagine they are citing it to talk about how brilliant it is though...