A Swedish court has ruled Google spent 15 years tilting search results in favour of its own price comparison service. Mortgage brokers know exactly what distorted search results look like in practice
Google has been ordered to pay nearly $2 billion (£1.5 billion) to Klarna after a Stockholm court ruled the tech giant had illegally favoured its own price comparison service over rivals in search results - a ruling that carries direct implications for the UK market where comparison sites have quietly reshaped how consumers find mortgage deals.
The Stockholm Patent and Market Court ruled on Wednesday that Google had illegally promoted its own comparison shopping tool over Klarna's PriceRunner across the UK, Swedish and Danish markets between 2008 and 2023. The $1.97 billion (£1.48 billion) award, including nearly $500 million (£377 million) in accrued interest, is the largest ever in a Swedish antitrust case. Klarna had originally sought close to $8 billion (£6 billion).
"PriceRunner is considered to have suffered damage as a result of Google having illegally favoured its price comparison service for many years," the court said. Google said it "doesn't agree with the court's decision" and is reviewing its legal options.
The mortgage angle
PriceRunner is a price comparison platform covering retail and financial products and the ruling firmly establishes something mortgage brokers have been saying for years: that Google's search results are not a neutral reflection of the market.
Compare the Market, MoneySuperMarket and MoneySavingExpert all carry mortgage comparison tools - the first two powered by L&C Mortgages, the third running its own best-buy tables. These platforms depend almost entirely on Google organic search for consumer traffic. When a first-time buyer searches "best mortgage rates", the results they see are not determined by which broker or service is most appropriate for their circumstances. They are determined by which platforms Google's algorithm surfaces.
As Mortgage Introducer has reported on brokers battling Google-driven misinformation, the consequences are tangible. Rachel Lummis of Xpress Mortgages described clients arriving at her desk with rates and products sourced from MoneySuperMarket that simply did not apply to them. "It can take 30 minutes to undo five minutes of Googling," she said. The PriceRunner ruling confirms that the search environment producing those client misconceptions was not operating on a level playing field.
The wider litigation wave
The Klarna ruling is the latest in a long series. After the European Commission fined Google €2.42 billion (£2.08 billion) in 2017 for favouring its own comparison service in search results, a wave of European price-comparison companies launched follow-on damages claims. Several remain pending. The PriceRunner award covers the UK, Sweden and Denmark - and it covers the entire period between 2008 and 2023 during which UK comparison sites built their current market positions.
Whether UK comparison sites pursue their own claims depends on their legal advisers and appetite for multi-year litigation. The scale of Wednesday's award - nearly $2 billion for a single comparison platform in three markets - will concentrate minds.
For mortgage brokers, the more immediate question is what a genuinely level search environment looks like. If a future ruling, regulatory intervention, or change in Google's behaviour shifts how comparison tools appear in financial services search results, the competitive landscape for consumer-facing mortgage advice changes with it. The digital platforms that have built large consumer franchises on dominant search visibility are not immune to that risk.
Klarna's chief executive said the ruling "supports a healthier, more competitive market for the way people compare products and services." Competition lawyers are already working out what to do with it. Mortgage brokers have been explaining the limits of comparison sites to clients for two decades. A Swedish court has now put a $2 billion number on those limits.
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