Foundem had been hit by a Google search penalty, caused by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. This pushed the website to the very bottom of search results lists for relevant queries like “price comparison” and “comparison shopping”.

This meant the couple’s website, which charged fees when customers clicked on their product listings through other websites, struggled to make money.

“We were monitoring our pages and their rankings, and then we saw them all drop almost immediately,” says Adam.

Even though Foundem’s launch day didn’t go as planned, it would lead to the start of something else: a 15-year legal battle that resulted in a then-record $2.4 billion fine. euros (£2 billion) for Google, which was considered to have abused their dominant market position.

The case has been hailed as a historic moment in the global regulation of Big Tech.

Google spent seven years fighting this verdict, delivered in June 2017, but in September this year Europe’s highest court – the European Court of Justice – rejected its appeals.

Speaking to Radio 4’s The Bottom Line in their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that at first they thought the shaky start to their website had simply been a mistake.

“At first we thought it was collateral damage, that we had been detected as spam by false positives,” says Shivaun, 55. “We just assumed we had to intervene in the right place and the case would be overturned.”

“If you are refused traffic, then you have nothing to do,” adds Adam, 58 years old.

The couple sent numerous requests to Google to have the restriction lifted but, more than two years later, nothing has changed and they say they have received no response.

Meanwhile, their website was “ranking just fine” on other search engines, but that didn’t really matter, according to Shivaun, because “everyone uses Google.”

The couple would later discover that their site wasn’t the only one that had been disadvantaged by Google: When the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017, there were around 20 plaintiffs, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp.