Swedish court orders Google to pay $1.5 billion over PriceRunner case

Google must pay about 14.3 billion Swedish kronor, or $1.5 billion, after the Stockholm Patent and Market Court found that PriceRunner was harmed by Google’s unlawful preference for its own comparison-shopping service. The ruling turns a long-running fight over search rankings into one of the largest antitrust damages awards ever handed down in Sweden.

PriceRunner sued Google Sweden AB, Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. in February 2022, initially seeking about €2.1 billion, or $2.4 billion. Court-related filings later put the claim at roughly 64 billion Swedish kronor, plus 14 billion kronor in accrued interest, making it the largest civil claim in Swedish legal history. The trial ran from October 20 to December 19, 2025, and the verdict was delayed several times before the court issued its decision on July 1, 2026.

The Stockholm court said PriceRunner had "suffered damage" because Google had unlawfully favored its own comparison-shopping service for years. Swedish court materials said the compensation awarded was lower than PriceRunner had sought and that part of the alleged harm period was time-barred. That matters because the award covers almost 15 years in the United Kingdom and just over ten years in Sweden and Denmark, sharply narrowing the scope of the damages compared with the original claim.

Klarna, which owns PriceRunner, said the court ruled in PriceRunner’s favor and put the award at $1.97 billion. Even at the lower court figure, the decision gives concrete financial weight to conduct regulators in Europe have been condemning for years: the use of a dominant search engine to steer users toward Google’s own shopping tools.

The Swedish case sits squarely on top of Google’s wider European antitrust history. The European Commission fined the company €2.42 billion on June 27, 2017 for abusing its dominance in shopping search by giving an illegal advantage to its own comparison-shopping service. The EU General Court upheld most of that decision in 2021, and the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld the Google Shopping ruling on September 10, 2024. Taken together, those decisions show that European enforcers and courts remain willing to punish self-preferencing in search and shopping, not just announce it.

For price-comparison services and retailers that depend on search traffic, the Swedish award raises the stakes well beyond a headline fine. It shows that antitrust findings can translate into damages claims that run into the billions, creating a stronger financial deterrent for dominant platforms that integrate first-party services into their core search products.