The Delhi High Court‘s Hindware ruling has garnered a lot of excitement, and understandably so. Many are cheering this decision as a long-overdue correction to something brands have quietly complained about for years. As a retail media advisor to Indian companies, I feel there are genuine arguments on both sides – and more importantly, the ruling itself doesn’t solve the underlying problem, but AI-led ad tech does. Instead of thinking about this as a zero-sum game where either the brand or the platform wins, we should be asking how keyword advertising becomes a win-win proposition for everyone in the ecosystem.
The Delhi High Court told Google it can’t auction off “Hindware” as a keyword to Hindware’s competitors. Brands have openly welcomed the judgment. Their stance is understandable, given that they spend years and crores building a brand, and then someone else uses the same brand name to reach the users through Ads. But advertising is Google’s primary monetisation engine and restricting how they run it is not straightforwardly fair either. I’ll leave the legal debate to the lawyers.
A lesson for all digital platforms
What’s more interesting and less discussed is that this ruling has implications far beyond Google. Every e-commerce platform running sponsored search faces the same structural question. It might be a trademark problem today, a regulatory issue tomorrow, or a purely commercial dispute in another case. But as long as platforms solve for one fundamental principle, i.e., making all stakeholders genuinely better off, none of these problems will threaten their monetization engine.
Google’s situation is also somewhat unique, given its dominant share of search. Brands have no real alternative but to work with Google even when the economics don’t feel fair. That’s probably why court and regulatory interventions are more likely here — the market can’t self-correct when there’s no meaningful competition. E-commerce platforms are in a different position. Market forces will intervene and force them to do the right thing well before any legal or regulatory action arrives. Which is exactly why the smarter move for retail media platforms is to get ahead of this now.
And here’s what “getting ahead of it” actually looks like — because there’s a third participant in this entire equation who has not been prominent in the public debate despite being the most important one: the customer. Everyone has been focused on the brand versus the platform, while the person actually doing the searching has not received enough attention.
The right way to think about ad monetisation is a three-way equation: the platform maximises revenue, users receive the most relevant ads, and brands get the highest returns on their spend. This is not a pipe dream — it’s a practical and tested model, but it requires platforms to invest in the right AI-based infrastructure and take a long-term view on their business.
Most platforms today are still running legacy systems — awarding ad slots to the highest bidder or selling purely based on delivering a certain number of ad impressions. These are largely win-lose-lose propositions that maximize short-term platform revenue while gradually eroding both user experience and advertiser returns. The platform wins the battle and loses the war. The shift that’s needed is toward relevance-based auctions and output-based bidding — optimising for actual orders and conversions rather than clicks and impressions. A well-built ad stack enables this without sacrificing short-term revenue. That’s the actual win-win-win.
The growing role of AI in ad targeting
Concretely, this means platforms need AI systems capable of predicting, at the individual user level and at every single ad serving instance, how likely a specific user is to convert on a specific ad. In that world, a brand like Hindware bidding on its own keyword doesn’t need to outspend anyone — its relevance score for that search is structurally overwhelming, and a well-calibrated model knows it. The brand wins the slot at a low bid, the user gets the result they were looking for, and the platform earns from a real transaction. The keyword problem largely dissolves on its own.
There’s one more tricky dimension in the ruling that hasn’t received enough attention. What happens when the brand is the category? Bisleri doesn’t just own a water brand — for most Indians, Bisleri is packaged water or Maggi is instant noodles or Harpic is the toilet cleaner. If courts start ruling that category-defining brand keywords belong exclusively to whichever brand first colonised the mental real estate, we’ve handed legacy incumbents a legal moat against every challenger trying to disrupt them. That’s not pro-consumer or pro-competition — it’s pro-incumbent, and it disproportionately favours large brands with deep pockets.
The ruling may feel like justice to some, and perhaps on narrow trademark grounds it is. But the real wake-up call here is for platforms to go back to basics — to ensure that the ads platform becomes a genuine growth lever for brands rather than being perceived as a tax. That requires concrete, technology-led investment to build systems that are sustainable for the long term.
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