The founders of the price comparison website Foundem initiated the legal journey in 2006 after noticing a significant drop in visibility on Google for critical search terms, such as “price comparison” and “shopping.” This downturn resulted from an automated penalty imposed by Google’s spam filters, effectively burying their site in search results and hampering revenue generation.
“We were monitoring our pages and how they were ranking, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately,” Adam Raff recounted to the BBC. Initially, the Raffs believed the situation was merely an oversight, assuming that “we just had to escalate to the right place and it would be overturned,” Shivaun told BBC Radio 4’s The Bottom Line.
After two years of repeated appeals to Google without any response, Foundem’s rankings remained unaffected on other search engines but continued to be nearly invisible on Google, drastically reducing traffic since “everyone’s using Google,” Shivaun explained.
By late 2008, Shivaun and Adam’s suspicions grew. Shortly before Christmas, Channel 5’s The Gadget Show awarded Foundem the “Best Price Comparison Website in the UK,” resulting in a traffic surge that temporarily slowed the site, initially mistaken as a cyberattack.
Despite reaching out to Google, they received no relief. “We said, look, surely it’s not benefitting your users to make it impossible for them to find us,” Shivaun recalled, but they were essentially told to “bog off.”Realizing the issue was more systemic, the couple filed complaints with regulators in the UK, US, and eventually in Brussels, where the European Commission (EC) launched an antitrust investigation in 2010. In 2017, the EC ruled against Google, determining that the tech giant abused its dominance by favoring its own shopping services over competitors. The decision, accompanied by a 2.4 billion-pound fine, marked a major win for the Raffs and was a precedent-setting move against Big Tech.Shivaun remembered the moment competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager announced the decision: “We’ve both been brought up maybe under the delusion that we can make a difference, and we really don’t like bullies.”
Google’s appeals stretched for another seven years until the European Court of Justice upheld the fine in September 2024, affirming the earlier ruling. A Google spokesperson maintained, “The CJEU judgment only relates to how we showed product results from 2008-2017. The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s Shopping decision have worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services.”
Despite the protracted legal journey, Shivaun and Adam now face another phase in their fight. They’ve filed a civil damages claim against Google, scheduled for trial in 2026. Although Foundem was forced to shut down in 2016, the couple remains steadfast in their commitment. “I think if we had known it was going to be quite as many years as it turned out to be, we might not have made the same choice,” Adam admitted.
