What Is Brand Bidding, and How Do You Defend Your Brand in Google Ads
Alfonso
Brand bidding is when another company sets up their Google Ads campaigns so their ad shows up when someone searches for your brand name. Not your category, not a generic term from your industry: your name, literally.
Almost everything written about this term explains it from the side of the company doing it: how to bid on a competitor's branded terms to siphon off cheap traffic.
This article is written from the other side: the side of the company it happens to without knowing. If you manage or oversee branded search campaigns, chances are someone is doing this to your brand right now, and you have no easy way of knowing it.
Why it happens
It's not always a direct competitor. In practice, it shows up in a few different forms:
Competitors looking for a shortcut: instead of building their own demand, they capture yours at the exact moment it's already been decided.
Unauthorized resellers or distributors: someone who sells (or claims to sell) your product and bids on your brand without your permission.
Aggressive affiliates: inside affiliate programs, some participants bid on the advertiser's own brand name to claim commission on a sale that would have happened anyway.
New entrants in your market: businesses without brand recognition of their own yet, using yours as a shortcut to get in front of buyers.
None of these cases require you to have identified them beforehand. They start bidding, and until you catch it, the cost is already being incurred.
How it hits you, beyond the ad itself
The damage isn't just "there's another company's ad when someone searches my brand." There are two concrete economic effects:
Your own brand CPC goes up. If someone else is bidding on your term, the auction stops being yours alone. Even if you keep the top position, you're likely paying more for the same click you used to get more cheaply.
You lose clicks that were already yours. Here's the technical nuance that rarely gets explained well: the CTR Google Ads reports for your brand campaign isn't the same as your real CTR against total brand search volume. Google Ads tells you what percentage of people who saw your ad clicked it. Search Console, separately, tells you how many total searches for your brand exist, and how many of them end up on your domain, whether through the ad or the organic result. When someone bids on your brand, that second number drops even while the first one holds steady, because a slice of those searches now ends up on someone else's ad. If you only look at the Google Ads panel, that leak is invisible.
Why it's hard to catch in time
The manual way to check is to search your own brand from a few different locations and devices and see what ads show up. It is called Auction Insights and you can see it in your Google Ads platform.
Does it work?
Yes, but it has three problems: you have to remember to do it, you have to do it separately for each market you sell in, and you only ever catch the exact moment you happen to look. If a competitor bids intermittently, or only at certain hours or in certain countries, you can go weeks without noticing even though it's happening.
That's what leads many companies to find out about the problem the worst possible way: a confused customer calling in because they clicked an ad thinking it was yours.
Is it legal to bid on someone else's brand?
It depends on the specific use of the term, on whether there's real confusion for the user, and on Google Ads' trademark policies, which under certain conditions allow bidding on someone else's brand terms without violating policy, while still leaving the brand owner mechanisms to file a complaint in cases of misleading use.
This isn't black and white, and we're not going to oversimplify it here. If you want the detail on when you can file a complaint and how to document one, that's a topic we'll cover in full in a dedicated article.
The US, the UK, and beyond: it's not one market
If you sell in more than one English-speaking market, brand bidding doesn't behave the same way everywhere. A competitor can be bidding on your brand in the US without touching the UK, or the other way around, because these are separate Google Ads accounts, separate budgets, and often entirely different local players who may not even exist in your home market.
Watching only the market where you're headquartered tells you nothing about what's happening in the other countries where you compete.
What to do about it
The first step is accepting that, if you invest seriously in brand search, this isn't a hypothetical risk, it's a question of when you'll catch it, not if it will happen. The second is deciding whether you want to keep checking it yourself, market by market, or rely on a system that monitors it continuously and alerts you the moment it happens, without requiring you to name who to look for in advance.
That's exactly what BidLemon does: it discovers who's bidding on your brand in Google Ads even when you don't know who they are yet, across the countries where you compete, with evidence captured from the moment it's detected.
You can see how it works at bidlemon.com.
What if someone's bidding on your brand right now?
Find out without having to check for yourself, market by market.