We attacked Google and forced them to pay out £2 billion

Foundem received a search penalty from Google, prompted by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. It pushed the website far down the search results lists for relevant queries such as ‘price comparison’ and ‘comparison purchases’.

It meant the couple’s website, which charged a fee when customers clicked through to other websites on their product listings, struggled to make money.

“We were monitoring our pages and seeing how they were ranking, and then almost immediately we saw them all plummet,” says Adam.

Although the launch day for Foundem did not go to plan, it would lead to the start of something else: a fifteen-year legal battle that culminated in a then-record €2.4 billion fine for Google, which was deemed to have abused its market dominance .

The case is being hailed as a milestone in the global regulation of Big Tech.

Google fought this June 2017 ruling for seven years, but in September this year the European Supreme Court – the European Court of Justice – dismissed its appeal.

In their first interview since that final verdict with Radio 4’s The Bottom Line, Shivaun and Adam explained that they initially thought their website’s faltering start was simply a mistake.

“We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we had been falsely detected as spam,” said Shivaun, 55. “We just assumed we had to escalate to the right place and it would be reversed.”

“If you don’t get traffic, you have no business,” Adam, 58, adds.

The couple sent numerous requests to Google to remove the restriction, but more than two years later nothing had changed and they said they received no response.

Meanwhile, their website scored “completely normal” on other search engines, but according to Shivaun that didn’t matter much since “everyone uses Google”.

The couple would later discover that their site wasn’t the only one harmed by Google: By the time the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017, there were about 20 plaintiffs, including Kelkoo, Trivago, and Yelp.