Who Owns Search? What the Hindware ruling means for brand & category keyword strategies

A Delhi court has done what a decade of industry debate could not: it has ruled that consumer intent built by a brand belongs to that brand. The verdict against Google may be a watershed moment for how India's booming performance marketing industry thinks about customer acquisition, keyword economics, and the future of brand-building in an AI-first world.

There is a moment in the life of every brand when it realises that its own name has become a commodity it must purchase back from a search engine. A consumer types a company's trademarked name into Google, a signal as direct and deliberate as walking into a store and asking for a product by name, and the first thing they see is a competitor's advertisement. That is the commercial absurdity that the Delhi High Court has now called by its legal name: trademark infringement.

Read earlier e4m story: The verdict challenges Google’s model

On May 22, 2026, Justice Mini Pushkarna permanently restrained Google LLC and Google India from using the registered trademark "HINDWARE" as an advertising keyword and directed the company to pay Rs 30 lakh in nominal damages to Hindware Limited. The dispute had been simmering since 2013, when Hindware discovered that rival sanitaryware brands Cera and Grohe had purchased its trademarked name as a keyword on Google's AdWords platform, causing competitor advertisements to appear ahead of Hindware's own results when users searched for the brand. 

Grohe and Cera eventually settled with Hindware during the proceedings. Google did not, and the court found that the platform's keyword auction system, far from being a neutral infrastructure, amounted to active facilitation of infringement. The court held that Google could not "shrug off responsibility by making available a tool that leads to infringement", rejecting the platform's defence that keywords are invisible backend triggers and therefore fall outside the scope of trademark use under Indian law.

The ruling arrives at a moment when India's digital advertising market is projected to reach Rs 95,000 crore in 2026, with search commanding a dominant share of performance budgets. Within that economy, competitor keyword bidding, the practice of purchasing a rival's brand name as a search keyword so that your advertisement appears when consumers look for them, has been one of the most widely used and commercially questionable tactics in the playbook. The court has now said it may also be an illegal one.

The Economics of Stolen Intent

This ruling matters beyond the sanitaryware category, it helps to understand the mechanics of what has been happening. At the centre of the dispute is a critical asset in digital marketing: branded search demand. Companies spend years and millions of rupees building awareness through advertising, product quality and reputation, only for consumers to eventually search for those brands by name. Such searches signal strong purchase intent and marketers widely regard them as some of the highest-converting traffic available online. The ability to intercept that demand through keyword advertising has long been a contentious practice in the search advertising ecosystem.

The Google auction system monetised this intent in both directions. Competitors paid to appear against a rival's brand keyword. And the brand itself, to protect its own name from being outbid, was forced to pay Google to appear prominently in searches for its own trademark. Google, for its part, has maintained that this practice operated within the bounds of both its policies and Indian trademark law. 

"We duly respect and operate in accordance with all local laws, and in instances where the orders are overbroad or inconsistent with our policies, we work to explain our position as per the legal process in the country," the company said in a statement, adding that its ads policy already prohibits competitor advertisers from using trademarked terms in the actual text of an advertisement. The court, however, found that restricting trademark use in ad copy is not the same as restricting it as a backend keyword trigger, and it is on that precise distinction that the ruling turns.

Shradha Agarwal, Co-Founder and Global CEO of Grapes Worldwide, describes the scale of the defensive spend this system created as considerable: "Approximately 30 to 35 per cent of your spend was coming in from brand competition, even if you are focusing heavily on category. I was only bidding on my brand keywords because somebody else was bidding on that. I was paying for the user who I had already converted for myself through my branding again here. And that is not fair."

For large, established brands, this dual cost was a significant drag on efficiency. For startups and challenger brands that do not advertise at the same scale, the asymmetry was more damaging still. A brand that relies on organic equity built over years had no defensive option other than to either bid on its own name or watch competitors divert its traffic.

Nithin Kamath, founder of Zerodha, who does not run paid advertising, spoke about the compounding effect of this dynamic on X: "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." He welcomed the ruling, noting that it opens a route to legal recourse and, importantly, levels the playing field for resource-constrained startups.

The auction economics are set to shift in meaningful ways. When competitors are restricted from bidding on a registered trademark, the auction for that keyword shrinks. Fewer bidders mean lower cost-per-click. Brands that were spending defensively on their own name to suppress rival bids will no longer need to do so, freeing budget to be redeployed elsewhere in the funnel. For leader brands with strong consumer recall, Agarwal notes this is enormously positive: "The brands will be the happiest today on the earth, specifically to do with leader brands. It is their brand keyword that they were saving and they had to constantly bid against it."

Challenger Brands, Category Keywords, and the Forced Reset

The ruling is not without its complications for newer or smaller players. Competitor keyword bidding was also a growth lever for challenger brands trying to reach consumers already in-market for a category. A D2C startup or a new-to-market brand had, in effect, been able to purchase reach against an established brand's loyal search audience for a fraction of what it would cost to build comparable awareness organically.

Prashant Puri, CEO and Co-Founder of AdLift, frames the central question the ruling raises: "The verdict has finally forced this question into the open. A consumer typing a brand name into search has largely already decided. That intent was built through years of the brand's own marketing, product experience, and reputation. The idea that a competitor could purchase that moment and redirect the consumer elsewhere, with the platform's active help, was always commercially questionable. The Delhi High Court has now said it is legally questionable too."

For challenger brands that have been living on competitor keyword traffic, the rethinking begins with category keywords. These are generic, intent-driven search terms that describe a product or service without naming a brand. As Agarwal explains, the shift towards category and brand keyword investment is now likely to accelerate: "You need to ensure that your product is great on a category keyword. And that will help you in terms of doing this. Plus your post strategies and platforms like Instagram, where you discover the brand, are going to play more." The implication is a meaningful reallocation of media mix, pushing budgets upward in the funnel toward awareness and discovery, rather than competing at the final moment of decision.

Ashish Bajaj, Co-Founder of 10on10Foods, reads the ruling as the beginning of the end of what he calls "lazy" performance tactics, "The Hindware verdict signals the death of conquesting as a lazy performance hack. The High Court has now drawn a hard line: algorithmic neutralism is no longer a defence for trademark infringement. This forces a strategic pivot from siphoning competitor intent to actually building your own."

Tejas Maha, Associate Director of Media at White Rivers Media, adds a measured perspective on the transition: "Advertisers that have historically allocated budget toward protecting branded search terms may revisit those strategies, while others may place greater focus on generic search demand, content-led discovery, customer retention, and brand-building initiatives. Over time, the decision could contribute to a broader emphasis on building stronger brand preference and customer relationships, alongside performance-driven acquisition tactics."

Platforms, Policy, and the Shadow of AI Search

The gap between what Google's policy covers and what the court has now ruled is the terrain where India's adtech economy will be renegotiated. Justice Pushkarna held that the use of a trademark as a keyword trigger, even when the trademark does not visibly appear in the final ad text, constitutes use in advertising under Section 29(6)(d) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999. That interpretation strips the platform of safe harbour protection under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, on the grounds that Google did not merely host a neutral tool but actively suggested and monetised trademarked keyword combinations through its own Keyword Planner.

The financial burden this system placed on Indian businesses is something entrepreneurs across sectors have felt acutely for years. Anupam Mittal, Founder of Shaadi.com, used X to be blunt about the cost: "Many startups pay anywhere between 20 to 50 per cent as Google Tax to get distribution and protect their own brand from bidders. It is the Digital East India Company." The comparison is pointed, invoking the language of commercial extraction by a foreign entity operating a system that Indian businesses had no practical alternative but to participate in. The underlying economics are hard to argue with. A startup directing half its marketing budget simply to appear in searches for its own trademarked name is not investing in growth; it is paying a toll to exist in the market.

Beerajaah Sswain, Managing Partner and Chief Digital and E-Commerce Officer at neugenm.ai, traces the arc of how this situation came to be, noting that the current arrangement was not always the norm: "Earlier, you could go and apply to Google, and you could copyright saying that nobody should use my brand keywords within that text and copy and target my keyword. That facility Google used to give earlier. And somehow Google opened that particular rule and just made it a wild west." For Sswain, the High Court's ruling is not a new legal imposition but a restoration of a brand protection that once existed and was quietly dismantled as the auction model matured and expanded.

But the more consequential frontier may be one the ruling does not yet touch. As consumers increasingly turn to AI-powered search tools to make decisions, from ChatGPT to Perplexity to Google's own AI Overviews, the competition for brand visibility is migrating inside AI-generated responses. There are no keyword auctions in these environments in the traditional sense. There is no ad text governed by trademark policy. Instead, brands compete for presence in answers generated by large language models, through what practitioners are beginning to call AEO and GEO.

Sswain describes a fundamental difference in consumer intent within these environments: "Earlier in Google, it is all about discovery. You go and search, you find a URL, you click on it and you discover it. But today, you are making a decision by talking to a particular LLM. It is a conversation. The intent is five or six times higher. So if I am targeting competition, which means somebody is already having a very intentful conversation with the competition, it is my wastage of media money." His firm advises clients to place competitors in negative keyword lists for LLM advertising, a practice that reflects both efficiency and an emerging understanding that the competitive dynamics of AI search are fundamentally different from the Google auction model.

Puri makes the forward-looking implication explicit: "As consumers increasingly get answers from AI-powered search rather than a list of links, the competition for brand visibility is moving inside AI-generated responses. A competitor blocked from bidding on your keyword today can still appear when someone asks an AI for the best alternative to your product or how your pricing compares. No keyword bid, no auction, and currently no legal framework to address it. The industry spent a decade debating who owns a keyword. The next debate, already forming, is who owns a brand's presence inside an AI answer."

Amit Verma, founder of DigitUp, sees the ruling as part of a broader correction toward fundamentals that the performance marketing era deferred: "It will push the price up for generic keywords and that will again push you to ask, are you good enough organically? Paying is anyways a lazy marketing effort. Talent is needed to focus on fundamentals. Such changes will keep coming. Fix the bottom line, be creative, use AI strategically."

The Hindware verdict, in this reading, is not simply a legal precedent for trademark enforcement in digital advertising. It is the beginning of a structural conversation about whether a decade of performance marketing's most effective growth levers were built on commercially and legally uncertain ground. India's digital ad market, on its way to Rs 95,000 crore in 2026 and projected to grow at a compounded 12 per cent annually through 2029, will need to reckon with that question. The auction systems, the campaign structures, the budget allocation models, and the legal accountability of adtech platforms are all in play. One Delhi court ruling has started the clock.a