Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, have found themselves in a prolonged legal confrontation with Google, and they describe the experience as Google effectively “disappearing us from the internet.”

Launch days are thrilling yet nerve-wracking for many start-up founders, but the day Shivaun and Adam launched their innovative price comparison website, Foundem, in June 2006 stands out as particularly challenging. They had poured their hearts into building the site, sacrificing well-paying jobs along the way, only to unwittingly step into a storm that would change everything.

On what should have been a triumphant day, Foundem was hit with a Google search penalty triggered by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. This unfortunate event buried their website in search results for essential queries like “price comparison” and “comparison shopping.” As a result, the site struggled to generate revenue, as it relied on users clicking through to other websites.

“We were closely monitoring our rankings, and then we saw them plummet almost instantly,” Adam recalls.

While the launch didn’t unfold as planned, it set the stage for a staggering 15-year legal battle that would culminate in a record €2.4 billion (£2 billion) fine against Google for abusing its market dominance—a decision that has been recognized as a pivotal moment in the regulation of Big Tech.

Although Google fought the ruling issued in June 2017 for seven years, Europe’s top court, the European Court of Justice, dismissed its appeals in September of this year. Speaking to Radio 4’s The Bottom Line in their first interview following the final verdict, Shivaun and Adam shared their initial thoughts during those early days.

“At first, we believed this was just collateral damage—a mistaken identification of our site as spam,” Shivaun, 55, explained. “We thought we could escalate the issue to the right people, and it would be resolved.”

Adam, 58, added, “If you’re denied traffic, you effectively have no business.”

The couple made numerous requests to Google to lift the restrictions placed on their site, but more than two years later, they had received no response, and the situation remained unchanged. While they found their website “ranking completely normally” on other search engines, Shivaun pointed out that it was irrelevant since “everyone’s using Google.”

Eventually, they learned that their site was not the only one negatively impacted by Google’s practices. By the time the tech giant was found guilty in 2017, about 20 other claimants, including Kelkoo, Trivago, and Yelp, were also in the fight against Google.