Nithin Kamath@Nithin0dha
In a landmark judgment on May 22, 2026, the Delhi High Court held Google liable for trademark infringement.
The case was between Hindware and Google. The court held that, by allowing competitors of Hindware to purchase the keyword “Hindware” (a trademarked name) through Google Ads, Google enabled trademark infringement. The court said that “Hindware” is not a generic English word but a specific brand trademark. By allowing competitors to place ads on that keyword, Google is enabling competitors to divert traffic that should have legitimately gone to Hindware.
This has been a big challenge for companies, both big and small. Even today, if you search for Zerodha, you will see search results from competitors. This has been happening for well over a decade.
Although it is hard to quantify, we have lost a lot of business to this. Think about what happens. Whenever someone searches for "Zerodha", the traffic should rightfully come to Zerodha. But what often happens is that the first couple of results on Google Search are ads, leading the customer to a competitor's website. In the process, we lose business that should have come to us.
This is made worse by the fact that we do not advertise.
There is also an even more ironic thing here. A lot of brands, just to capture the traffic that should have come to them organically, end up bidding on their own keywords. Think about it. If you own a business and have a trademarked name for your business, you still have to pay Google just to hopefully make your name too expensive for your competition to run ads on it.
But now, thanks to the Delhi High Court judgment, we have the option of taking legal action whenever we come across instances of other companies squatting on our keyword.
The other brilliant part about this judgment is that it levels the playing field. And this matters even more for startups, who are already starved for resources and have the odds stacked against them. The last thing they need is for competitors to bid on their brand keywords and steal their traffic.
This judgment now opens up a route for legal recourse whenever such deceptive practices occur.
While keyword squatting is most visible in Google web results, it is an even bigger problem when it comes to app stores. Whenever someone searches for your brand, the first couple of results, both above and below your app listing, often tend to be those of your competitors. And in the case of app stores, I think the ads are even more problematic. When a user clicks on an app-store ad, they often end up installing an app. That is a much higher-commitment action than clicking on a competitor’s web search result and then just closing the page. Because the user has installed an application, the conversions, at least anecdotally, tend to be much higher.
Again, brands that do not advertise are at the receiving end of this. So I welcome this ruling and hope this changes the unfair norms we've been living by for so long.
