I think you may be overstating the legal standard. I believe the bar is “creates confusion in the marketplace” rather than “misleading”. A customer clicking a link for $Restaurant and being taken to a page of competing restaurants may or may not be misleading but I definitely think its confusing. Every consumer who clicks that link expects $Restaurant’s page or a page dedicated to $Restaurant and doesn’t get it.

You're right in your first para, wrong in the rest.

You can't lawfully squat a brands trademarks, neither in SERPs, domain names, nor in real world signposts.

You can use trademarks for comparison but having a signpost - virtual or actual - that has another brand on it is tortuous infringement. Bait and switch is rightly unlawful.

"Tortious"?

An action that is against a "tort", ie a civil law offence is "tortuous". It's like "criminal" but for civil law.

Hmm, I've been using "tortuous" as the adjective for tort for probably a couple of decades and you're the first person to try to correct me. Clearly I'm using what Wiktionary classes as usage that's obsolete.

Interestingly googling around the principle usage -- to mean pertaining to a tort -- of this spelling is in UK Terms of Use. It's quite hard to search though as often people will talk about tortuous caselaw [1], meaning 'twisting and turning'. Both usages can be in the same document, so Google Search - in particular - is no good here.

Spelling "tortuous": I find supporting documents from the UK Home Office [3], the UK IPO (including in court proceedings for trademark), and in private practice references to UK tort law, eg [2] dated 2019.

I don't consider my usage to be wrong per se but will consider using tortious in international forums (I so wanted to write "fora", lol); thanks for the query, terse as it was.

It's possible we're all using it "incorrectly" of course. I work in the IP sector, we might all be drinking from the same fountain (eg perhaps reading past UK caselaw keeps us archaic).

[1] https://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/brand-management/signif..., example of talking about an intricate case that twists and turns.

[2] https://thelawreviews.co.uk/edition/the-intellectual-propert... talking about an infringement of a tort, as tortuous.

[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/references-to-the... , note I'm assuming the Home Office is the origin, it's Gov, but I don't really see mention of the department that owns that data.

If "tortuous" didn't already have a completely different useful meaning, I wouldn't object. Calling harmful behavior "tortious" shouldn't be ambiguous. I'm not sure what happened in olden times, but over the last decade "tortuous" has dominated because of clueless spellcheck.

It's just a slight misspelling. It should be "tortious" instead of "tortuous" [1]. Interestingly, my spell checker does not recognize the former, but it does the latter.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tortious

> googling around the principle usage

While we're on the topic—that's probably ‘principal’.

> What these companies are doing is definitely misleading but I don't think anyone is accidentally purchasing from Applebees thinking they were getting Saddleback BBQ.

That is exactly what is happening. Say Saddleback isn't open on Tuesdays. Boom, that visitor now sees a long list of BBQ joints to order from that can still be delivered. Since they are in the mood for BBQ clearly, they are going to order from Uncle Bucks BBQ instead.