We take on Google and force them to pay £2 billion

Foundem had been hit by a Google search penalty, caused by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. It pushed the website down the search results lists for relevant queries like “price comparison” and “buy comparison.”

This meant the couple’s website, which charged a fee when customers clicked on their product listings to access other websites, was struggling to make money.

“We were monitoring our pages and their rankings, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately,” Adam says.

While Foundem’s launch day did not go as planned, it would lead to the start of something else: a 15-year legal battle that culminated in a record €2.4bn (£2bn) fine for Google, which was considered to have abused its dominance in the market.

The case has been hailed as a landmark moment in the global regulation of Big Tech.

Google spent seven years fighting that verdict, issued in June 2017, but in September of this year the highest European court (the European Court of Justice) rejected its appeals.

Speaking to Radio 4’s The Bottom Line in their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that they initially thought the faltering start to their website had simply been a mistake.

“At first we thought it was collateral damage, that a false positive had been detected as spam,” says Shivaun, 55. “We just assumed we had to climb to the right place and it would be overturned.”

“If they deny you traffic, then you have nothing to do,” adds Adam, 58.

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

Meanwhile, his website was “ranking perfectly” on other search engines, but that didn’t matter, according to Shivaun, since “everyone uses Google.”

The pair would later discover that their site wasn’t the only one Google had put at a disadvantage: When the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017, there were around 20 plaintiffs, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp.