The Delhi High Court Just Told Google: You Cannot Sell a Brand’s Name to Its Competitors

A court just told Google it cannot sell your brand name to your competitors. Here is what that actually means for anyone running a business online.

Type any brand into Google. There is a good chance you will see a sponsored ad from a competing company before you even reach the brand you were looking for. That is not a bug. It is a product Google has been selling for years.

On May 22, 2026, the Delhi High Court ruled that this practice is trademark infringement. Justice Mini Pushkarna, in a 163-page judgment, permanently restrained Google LLC and Google India from using the registered trademark “HINDWARE” as an advertising keyword. The court ordered Google to pay Rs 30 lakh in nominal damages to Hindware Limited and held that the invisible use of a trademark as a backend trigger still counts as using it, commercially and legally.

Here is the thing. This case took twelve years to reach a verdict. But what it has unlocked could affect every brand running Google Ads today, not just in India.

How This Started

Back in 2013, Hindware discovered that rival sanitaryware brand Cera and its website developer were purchasing the keyword “HINDWARE” through Google’s AdWords programme. A year later, plumbing fixtures manufacturer Grohe had done the same. The result: every time a customer searched for Hindware products, sponsored links for Cera and Grohe appeared at the top of results.

Hindware filed suit. Grohe and Cera eventually settled, leaving Google as the sole contesting defendant. That turned a trademark dispute into something structurally more significant: a direct challenge to whether a platform that actively suggests, auctions, and monetises another company’s brand name can legally hide behind intermediary neutrality.

According to the judgment, Google had internally estimated back in 2009 that allowing trademark keyword bidding would generate at least USD 100 million in incremental annual revenue. The court factored that in.

The Legal Argument Google Lost

Google’s defence was consistent with the one it has deployed globally: keywords are invisible backend triggers. Consumers never see the trademark itself in the ad text. Therefore, the argument went, no “use” of the trademark occurs under law, and any responsibility lies with the advertiser who placed the bid, not the platform running the auction.

The court rejected this entirely.

Justice Pushkarna held that Section 29(6)(d) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, defines use “in advertising” broadly enough to cover invisible keyword triggers. She went further under Section 29(8), which does not require proof of consumer confusion. What it requires is evidence of unfair advantage, detriment to distinctive character, or conduct contrary to honest commercial practice.

The court found all three. When a consumer types “Hindware” into a search bar, that person searched for Hindware because Hindware built a reputation worth searching for. A competitor that buys that word as a keyword is not creating demand. It is diverting demand someone else built. The court called this free-riding on goodwill and held that Google profited from it directly through its pay-per-click model.

Crucially, the court also found that Google played an active role. It suggested trademarked terms through its Keyword Planner tool, ran the auctions that priced them, and earned revenue each time a sponsored link got clicked. That active commercial participation stripped Google of its claim to safe harbour protection under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, a defence typically available to passive intermediaries.

“Google cannot be permitted to shrug off responsibility by making available a tool that leads to infringement, and then turning around to claim that the said tool was not mandatory.”
Justice Mini Pushkarna, Hindware Ltd. v. Google LLC, May 22, 2026

What the Ruling Means Practically

This is not an abstract legal win for a sanitaryware brand. The implications reach every business that has ever paid to appear in searches for its own name, or watched competitors do the same.

A few things are now clearer:

Invisible use is still use. The judgment closes a loophole that platforms had relied on globally. Using a trademark as an ad trigger, even one consumers never see, counts as using it under Indian trademark law. That changes how infringement is evaluated in digital advertising.

Platform neutrality has limits. The “we just built the tool” defence does not hold when the platform actively suggests, prices, and profits from the transaction. The court drew a clean line between passive infrastructure and active commercial participation. Google was on the wrong side of that line.

You effectively paid a tax to exist on searches for your own name. The judgment acknowledged this directly. Google’s system forces brand owners to bid on their own registered trademarks just to maintain top placement. Rivals get to sit above you on your own brand’s search results while you pay more to compete with them. The court described this as Google “seizing and selling” commercial value it had no legal right to exploit.

Platform policies are not enough. Google’s own AdWords policy in India did not prohibit the use of trademarked terms as keywords. The court found this demonstrated a failure to exercise the “due diligence” expected from an intermediary under law. If a platform permits a practice, that does not make the practice legal.

What It Does Not Mean

The verdict is significant. It is not a blanket ban on competitor keyword advertising.

Legal analysis from AdSpyder points out that the court placed considerable weight on specific factors: HINDWARE is a coined word with no dictionary meaning, the brand had been declared a well-known trademark by the Delhi High Court itself in 2017, and the case went through a full trial with extensive evidence, including testimony from Google executives.

That matters. The legal strength of any brand’s position in a similar dispute will depend on whether the trademark is registered, how distinctive it is, and what evidence exists of commercial harm.

Ravi Goyal, partner at Delhi-based law firm Scriboard, told Business Standard that the ruling should not be read as an outright ban and that there is a strong possibility Google could appeal. The verdict appears to create some tension with the Delhi High Court’s 2023 MakeMyTrip versus Booking.com decision, where a division bench declined relief and found that users searching for MakeMyTrip would not be confused into thinking Booking.com’s services originated from MakeMyTrip.

The key difference: MakeMyTrip was decided at the interim stage without a full trial. Hindware went through complete proceedings, with evidence assessed in detail. Legal experts believe the apparent divergence may eventually require clarification from India’s Supreme Court.

How This Fits Into Global Precedent

India is not the first country to wrestle with this. Courts globally have landed in different places, and the Hindware ruling places India in an interesting position relative to both European and US approaches.

In the EU, the Court of Justice ruled in Google France v Louis Vuitton (2010) that advertisers can bid on a competitor’s trademark as a keyword, provided the resulting ad does not create confusion about the origin of the goods. The subsequent Interflora v Marks and Spencer ruling (2011) added complexity around dilution and free-riding. EU courts ultimately look at whether the ad itself causes consumer confusion. If the ad clearly signals a different brand, the keyword bid is often permissible.

In the US, courts have generally been even more permissive. Comparative advertising and competitor keyword bidding tend to survive legal challenge unless the ad itself makes false or confusing claims about the original brand.

The Hindware ruling takes a different path. Section 29(8) of India’s Trade Marks Act does not require confusion as a threshold test. It is enough to show unfair advantage or detriment to distinctive character. That shifts the analysis from “were consumers confused?” to “did the advertiser take commercial benefit from someone else’s brand equity without permission?”

That is a meaningfully stricter standard. And it applies to the platform, not just the advertiser.

What Businesses Should Actually Do Now

The practical steps below apply to any brand spending on paid search, globally. You do not need to be operating in India for the strategic logic to apply.

Step 1: Check if competitors are bidding on your brand right now

Open Google and search for your exact brand name. Look at the top results. Are any sponsored ads from competitors appearing? Take screenshots with dates. This is your baseline and potential evidence if you need it.

Also search for your brand name in incognito mode. Personalisation can hide results that others see.

Step 2: Register your trademark if you have not already

The Hindware ruling applied to a registered trademark. An unregistered business name does not carry the same statutory protection. If your brand name is not yet filed, the time to act is now. In India, file through the Intellectual Property India (ipindia.gov.in) portal. Internationally, the World Intellectual Property Organization runs the Madrid System, which allows filing in over 130 countries through a single application.

Step 3: Use Google’s trademark complaint mechanism

Google does allow trademark owners to file complaints about the use of their mark in ad text. Google’s trademark complaint form lets verified trademark owners restrict competitors from using their registered mark in visible ad copy within specific countries. Note: this covers the ad text itself, not the backend keyword trigger. The Hindware ruling directly challenges whether that distinction is legally defensible.

Step 4: Run a brand search audit across your marketing team

Check whether your own Google Ads campaigns are bidding on competitor trademarks. Given the Hindware ruling, continuing to bid on well-known trademarked terms carries genuine legal risk, particularly in India. Brief your digital agency or performance marketing team on the new legal landscape and get clarity on which keywords are in active use.

Step 5: Diversify so you are not entirely dependent on paid search

The ruling highlights a real structural problem: relying on Google Ads for brand search traffic means paying a platform that has simultaneously been auctioning your brand name to rivals. The longer-term fix is building traffic channels that do not route through that dynamic. These include:

SEO built on genuinely useful content your audience searches for
An email list that gives you direct access to customers without platform intermediaries
Brand mentions across independent publications that build organic authority
Community presence on platforms where your audience already spends time

Zerodha’s Nithin Kamath made this point clearly on X after the ruling dropped. His company discovered that users searching specifically for “Zerodha” regularly encountered competitor ads before reaching Zerodha’s own website, and that the only way to stay visible was to bid on their own trademark. He called it paying Google to make your own name too expensive for competitors to run ads on. The court agreed that this was a problem.

The Bigger Shift: From Platform Neutrality to Platform Accountability

There is a broader argument running through this judgment that matters beyond keyword advertising.

For the better part of two decades, digital platforms have operated under a legal assumption: that providing a tool is different from using a tool. Build the auction system, run the infrastructure, take a cut, but do not own the choices advertisers make inside it. That framing has shaped platform liability law globally.

The Hindware ruling says that framing does not hold when the platform is commercially entwined with the outcomes. Suggesting trademarked terms to bidders. Running auctions on them. Earning revenue each time someone clicks the ad triggered by a competitor’s brand. At that level of participation, the platform is not neutral. It is a commercial actor in the transaction.

As Yukti Gupta, managing partner at Thistle and Law, told Business Standard: “The judgment suggests that where a platform derives commercial benefit from the exploitation of trademark value, it may also have to bear a corresponding degree of legal responsibility.”

This could reshape how courts evaluate safe harbour protections across the digital economy, well beyond keyword advertising.

What Happens Next

The immediate verdict is clear. Google is permanently restrained from using “HINDWARE” or its variations as keywords in its advertising programme. Rs 30 lakh in damages plus litigation costs, payable jointly by Google LLC and Google India.

What is less clear: whether Google appeals, whether a higher court revisits the tension with the MakeMyTrip ruling, and whether this judgment becomes a template for similar cases across India’s digital economy. Other brand owners, particularly those with strong consumer recall and well-known trademark status, are watching closely.

For platform liability, the ruling is the part that may prove most significant long-term. The court found that Google’s safe harbour defence under the IT Act failed because of Google’s active role in the advertising ecosystem. If that reasoning holds in future cases, every advertising platform that actively monetises brand equity could face a similar challenge.

The Hindware case took twelve years. Future cases will not take that long, now that the legal foundation has been laid.

Key Facts at a Glance

Detail	Information
Case name	Hindware Ltd. v. Grohe India Pvt Ltd & Ors.
Citation	2026:DHC:4614 / 2026 LLBiz HC (DEL) 541
Decided	May 22, 2026
Judge	Justice Mini Pushkarna, Delhi High Court
Damages awarded	Rs 30 lakh (Rs 15 lakh per suit), payable jointly by Google LLC and Google India
Key statute	Sections 29(6)(d) and 29(8), Trade Marks Act, 1999
Safe harbour rejected	Section 79, Information Technology Act
Judgment length	163 pages

The strongest digital moat is not borrowed visibility. A court just put that in writing.

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