Stockholm's Patent and Market Court ordered Google and its parent Alphabet on July 1, 2026 to pay Klarna Technologies AB damages for diverting search traffic away from the comparison shopping service formerly known as PriceRunner, ruling that the changes Google made in 2017 to satisfy a European Commission order never actually ended the abuse the Commission had condemned.

The judgment in Case PMT 1860-22 fixes the principal damages at 950,000,000 British pounds for the United Kingdom market, 675,000,000 Danish kroner for Denmark, and 1,142,000,000 SEK for Sweden. Google LLC and Google Sweden AB are jointly and severally liable for those sums, with Alphabet Inc. liable alongside them for harm arising from October 2, 2015 onward, the date Alphabet became the group's parent company.

Accrued interest through October 31, 2025 adds substantially to the bill. On the British portion alone, the court set accrued interest at 316,226,468 pounds, bringing the pounds-denominated award to roughly 1.27 billion before any further interest accrues. The court ordered continuing interest at the Bank of England base rate plus two percentage points on part of the sum, and eight percent annual interest from the date of judgment until payment.

A finding that the 2017 remedy failed

The case turns on a question that has shadowed European competition enforcement for nearly a decade: did Google's response to the Commission's 2017 decision genuinely stop the conduct, or merely rearrange it?

On June 27, 2017, the Commission adopted Decision C(2017) 4444 in Case AT.39740, concluding that Google had abused its dominant position in general search by promoting its own comparison shopping service and demoting rivals. Google was given 90 days to end the infringement or face penalty payments. It implemented what the parties call the Modifications on September 28, 2017. Under that mechanism, competing comparison shopping services could bid for placement inside the Shopping Unit at the top of the results page, and a link identifying the service placing each ad appeared beneath it.

The Patent and Market Court found this insufficient. According to the judgment, the Shopping Unit remained positioned and presented in a prominent and attractive manner relative to competing services, still grouped in a dedicated box at the top of the page and still carrying product images, while rival services outside that box continued to appear only as ordinary blue links subject to demotion by Google's ranking algorithms.

Central to that conclusion is the court's treatment of the Shopping Unit itself. Google argued that the box did not constitute its comparison shopping service at all, and that giving rivals equal access to bid within it therefore satisfied the requirement of equal treatment. The court rejected the argument. It held that the Shopping Unit, as it functioned after the Modifications, was to be regarded as Google's comparison shopping service, so the favourable placement of that box amounted to continued self-preferencing. For the period from September 28, 2017 through December 31, 2023, the court concluded, the specific conduct the Commission had condemned remained in place.

The algorithms that were never changed

The judgment devotes close attention to two ranking systems, Algorithm A and the Panda algorithm. According to the ruling, Algorithm A was built by Google's web spam team and launched in 2004, while Panda reached the United Kingdom on April 11, 2011 and Denmark and Sweden on August 12, 2011. Both were designed to address low-quality content rather than to target comparison sites. The court accepted that Google did not create them to demote rivals.

Demotion was nonetheless the effect. The court cited the Commission's finding, at recital 358 of the Decision, that both systems tend by their inherent characteristics to downgrade comparison shopping services, which compile offers already published elsewhere and generate many similar pages listing the same products. Those are precisely the traits the algorithms penalise. Google confirmed that it did not significantly alter the ranking algorithms to comply with the Decision, emphasising that the Decision imposed no such obligation. The court agreed no obligation existed, but noted that the same freedom did not exempt the Shopping Unit from the equal-treatment requirement.

Google also argued that a well-run site with relevant content could still rank prominently among organic results. The court was unpersuaded, observing that it was unlikely nearly every comparison service across the major markets of the European Economic Area had simultaneously become poorly managed at the moment Panda launched. PriceRunner, the judgment records, had been praised and cited as one of the best services in its markets both before and after the Modifications, and had followed Google's Webmaster Guidelines, now called Google Search Essentials. In the United Kingdom the company felt compelled to change its domain name in 2018, which briefly improved visibility before it declined again.

How the traffic loss was measured

Google's dominance in the relevant markets was not seriously in doubt. Drawing on StatCounter data submitted by PriceRunner, the court found that from 2017 to 2023 Google's search market share in Sweden never fell below 85 percent on desktop and 98 percent on mobile. The comparable Danish figures were 89 and 98 percent, and the British figures 82 and 96 percent. A report from the United Kingdom competition authority put Google's share of 2019 search volume at 93 percent on desktop and 97 percent on mobile.

To connect that dominance to lost revenue, the court relied on evidence about how users behave on a results page. PriceRunner cited a 2019 study by the Nielsen Norman Group tracking eye movement across search results. According to that study, 28 percent of clicks on organic results go to the first result, 19 percent to the second, and 12 percent to the third, with the count falling sharply thereafter. Visibility above the fold, the portion of the page shown without scrolling, carried similar weight. The court found user behaviour had not changed after the Decision, and that the pattern matched what intuitively seemed likely: higher placement draws more attention and more clicks.

The mechanics of the Shopping Unit reinforced the point. According to testimony from Samuel Braendle cited in the judgment, the horizontal box could hold up to 40 product ads, and users scrolled sideways within it. After the Modifications, Google Shopping operated in the affected markets through a unit described as Google Shopping Europe, which bid in the same auction as other operators on terms Google said were designed to keep it self-sustaining through a fixed margin on each seller's bid.

Damages set by the court, not the parties

The size of the award reflects a striking gap between what Klarna sought and what it received. PriceRunner's primary claim ran to 10,234,900,000 SEK, 8,878,800,000 Danish kroner, and 3,171,900,000 British pounds in principal, before interest. The court granted damages amounting to roughly one-quarter of the total claimed.

That reduction followed from how the court handled the counterfactual. Both sides submitted extensive economic modelling to estimate what PriceRunner would have earned absent the infringement, an exercise the Commission's own guidance describes as inherently uncertain, since no single true value for the harm can be established. The court found neither side's economic reports fully persuasive and estimated the damages itself. It adopted an approach comparing PriceRunner's traffic development against the growth of the wider e-commerce sector, a method the judgment attributes to the Berlin Regional Court II in the idealo and Producto proceedings.

Two limits further reduced the award. The court held that part of the British claim, covering harm from January 1, 2008 through January 10, 2009, was barred by the statute of limitations under English law. It also declined to award compensation for residual harm after December 31, 2023, finding the evidence did not prove damage in that later period given PriceRunner's chosen model and the procedural assumption that the infringement had ended on that date.

On mitigation, the court sided with the plaintiff. Google had argued that PriceRunner should have limited its losses through different search optimisation, greater investment, a changed business focus, or participation in the compliance mechanism. The court found Google had not shown that PriceRunner, through its own fault, caused the traffic decline, and so declined to reduce the damages on that basis.

Why the outcome was mixed

The judgment is not a clean victory for either party. Klarna recovered a substantial sum and secured a finding that Google's post-2017 conduct remained unlawful, a conclusion with implications reaching well beyond this dispute. Yet because it prevailed on only about a quarter of the amount it claimed, the court treated it as a partially unsuccessful party for the purpose of costs. Under Chapter 18 of the Swedish Code of Judicial Procedure, PriceRunner was ordered to reimburse half of Google's reasonable litigation costs, and separately to reimburse Google LLC 4,774,818 euros, 1,918,803 pounds, and 5,803,235 SEK in litigation costs, of which the bulk relates to attorneys' fees.

The court also addressed fault. Applying the relaxed standard of intent or negligence that governs competition damages, it found that Google should have understood the effects its post-Modification conduct would have on the market for comparison shopping services, and that the violation occurred at least through negligence. The judgment notes that the Commission never issued formal notice that the Modifications complied with the Decision, that it repeatedly requested changes, and that it has since acted against Google under the self-preferencing provisions of the Digital Markets Act.

Context for the marketing community

For advertisers, publishers, and comparison platforms, the ruling matters less for its currency total than for what it establishes about remedy design. The EU Court of Justice upheld the original 2.4 billion euro Google Shopping fine on September 10, 2024, confirming the Commission's finding that Google had favoured its own service. The Stockholm judgment goes a step further by testing whether the fix Google built in response actually worked, and concluding it did not.

That question sits at the centre of live regulatory action. In November 2024 Google introduced more than 20 modifications to its European search results, and a coalition of over 20 comparison sites including PriceRunner argued those changes still failed to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Frustration with the pace of enforcement grew until eighteen industry organisations wrote to the Commission president demanding a formal non-compliance decision on Google Search self-preferencing. The Commission has been weighing a record DMA fine tied to the same self-preferencing question, even as Google proposed testing rival vertical search units inside its results to address the Commission's concerns.

The judgment also illustrates the growing weight of private litigation running alongside public enforcement. In the United States, courts have cleared a path for publishers to pursue private damages against Google in ad tech cases once liability has been established elsewhere. The Stockholm decision applies the same logic in Europe: a Commission finding of abuse, upheld by the Court of Justice, becomes the foundation for a claimant to quantify and recover its own losses. For any business dependent on organic search traffic, the case documents in unusual detail how placement, presentation, and ranking algorithms translate into revenue, and how a court values that revenue when it is diverted.

Timeline

  • January 2008: Google Product Universal launches in the United Kingdom, marking the start of the abuse period there
  • November 2013: The Shopping Unit launches in Sweden and Denmark, marking the start of the abuse period in those markets
  • June 27, 2017: The European Commission adopts Decision C(2017) 4444, finding Google abused its dominant position and fining it 2.4 billion euros
  • September 28, 2017: Google implements the Modifications intended to comply with the Decision
  • February 15, 2022: PriceRunner's complaint is served on Google
  • December 28, 2023: PriceRunner serves supplemental claims covering damages through December 31, 2023
  • September 10, 2024: The Court of Justice of the European Union upholds the 2.4 billion euro fine
  • October 31, 2025: Cut-off date for accrued interest calculated in the judgment
  • July 1, 2026: The Patent and Market Court issues its judgment in Case PMT 1860-22

Summary

Who: The Stockholm Patent and Market Court, ruling in favour of Klarna Technologies AB, formerly PriceRunner International AB, against Google LLC, Google Sweden AB, and parent company Alphabet Inc.

What: A damages judgment ordering Google and Alphabet to pay 950,000,000 British pounds, 675,000,000 Danish kroner, and 1,142,000,000 SEK in principal, plus interest that lifts the pounds-denominated figure above 1.26 billion, after the court found that Google's 2017 compliance measures never ended the search-traffic abuse the European Commission had condemned. The award represents roughly one-quarter of the amount claimed.

When: The judgment was issued on July 1, 2026, covering harm from January 2008 in the United Kingdom and November 2013 in Sweden and Denmark through December 31, 2023.

Where: The Patent and Market Court in Stockholm, applying Swedish, English, and EU competition law across the United Kingdom, Danish, and Swedish markets.

Why: The court held that the Shopping Unit remained Google's own comparison shopping service after the 2017 Modifications, that ranking algorithms including Panda continued to demote competing services, and that this diverted traffic and revenue from PriceRunner, establishing negligent conduct for which Google is liable in damages.