Competitor bidding on your brand name

The instinct is to call it theft and look for someone to complain to. Save the energy. Google's trademark policy permits advertisers to use a trademarked term as a keyword. What it restricts is use of the trademark inside ad text, and that is a separate complaint with a separate process and a separate outcome.

The practical question is not whether it is fair. It is how much of your existing demand you are handing to somebody else, and whether buying it back is worth the money.

Who is actually taking these clicks?

Usually two groups, and they behave differently.

Direct competitors, who are betting that a portion of people searching your name have not fully decided. That bet is often good, especially for services where people compare three companies.

Lead aggregators and directories, who are a bigger problem in most trades. They buy your name, capture the click, and sell that person as a lead to several companies including possibly you. You end up paying for a customer who was already looking for you specifically. That pattern is worth understanding on its own, since competing with national lead aggregators in your own market is a broader fight than one keyword.

The person searching your business name is the warmest traffic you will ever have. Losing them at the last step is the most expensive kind of loss.

There is less room above you than there used to be. Sterling Sky's 2026 field data, using Jepto and Places Scout tracking, records local pack ads growing from around 1% of tracked mobile reports in early 2025 to around 22% by December 2025, and Local Services Ads growing from around 11% to 31% of tracked queries in the same window. Joy Hawkins's own summary of the trend is that Google is going pay to play. That is an agency reporting on its own tracked keyword set rather than a census, so read it as direction rather than as a measurement of your market. The direction is that paid units are eating vertical space above the organic result you were relying on.

Should I run ads on my own name?

For most businesses with a real name recognition problem to defend, yes, and the reason is not the one usually given.

The common objection makes sense on its face. Why pay for a click I would get free from the organic result right below. If nobody else were bidding, that objection would be right, and if you search your name and see no ads at all, you can skip this.

But when a competitor is showing above you, the free organic result is below their paid one. You are not choosing between paying and not paying. You are choosing between paying and letting somebody else answer a search for your own name.

Brand keywords are typically cheap because Google's Quality Score estimates relevance between the keyword, the ad and the landing page, and a business advertising on its own name scores well on all three. The budget required is usually small, and it is the highest converting money in the account, which also makes it the most misleading. Watch that it does not flatter your overall numbers and hide a weak campaign elsewhere.

One trap. Brand campaigns can quietly eat budget that was meant for new demand, and a shared budget across campaigns is how ads go dark before the month ends. Give the brand campaign its own budget, and understand why ads stop mid-month when pacing is wrong before you combine anything.

What does defending my name actually cost me?

Work it out before you decide, because for some businesses the honest answer is that it does not pay.

There is no published benchmark for brand-term cost per click, and I have looked. LocaliQ, which publishes the widest set of search advertising benchmarks under the WordStream name, reports by industry rather than by keyword type: $5.42 average cost per click across all industries in its 2026 edition, $8.33 for Home and Home Improvement, $8.00 for Dentists, $2.05 for Restaurants and Food. Those are medians across a large campaign sample, and LocaliQ sells advertising management, so they are vendor research. Your brand clicks should land well under the category figure. Nobody publishes how far under, so the arithmetic below uses the all-industry median as a deliberate worst case.

Price the defense. Say Google Search Console shows 200 people a month searching some version of your business name, and your brand campaign takes 60 of those clicks. At the $5.42 all-industry median that is $325 a month (derived). Your real cost will very likely be lower.

Price what it protects. Your average job is worth $600 at a 30% gross margin, so a job contributes $180. Break-even on the defense is $325 divided by $180, which is 1.8 jobs a month (derived).

Now ask whether the defense can produce two jobs. Sixty clicks at LocaliQ's 8.18% all-industry conversion rate is 5 leads (derived). Brand searchers close far better than cold traffic, so call it 50% and you have 2.5 customers (derived), worth $450 of gross margin (derived) against $325 of spend. Narrowly worth it, and only narrowly.

Then change one input. Make the average job $200 at the same margin, so a job contributes $60. Now the same defense needs 5.4 jobs a month (derived) to break even and it produces 2.5. At a low ticket, defending your name loses money, and the right answer is to let the competitor have the click.

That is the calculation nobody runs before setting up a brand campaign because everyone assumes brand traffic is free money. It is cheap money, which is different. Rerun those four lines with your own search volume, your own job value and your own margin.

Should I bid on my competitors' names?

Sometimes, and the honest answer depends on what you are willing to spend to interrupt somebody else's decision.

It works best when you have a genuine, statable difference. Faster response, licensed for something they are not, a service they do not offer. It works badly when the ad simply says you are also a plumber, because the searcher already had a plumber in mind and you gave them no reason to switch.

The costs are real. Competitor terms convert worse than almost anything else, quality scores are low so clicks cost more, and there is a decent chance they notice and start bidding on your name in return. That escalation is expensive for both of you and useful to Google.

Keep their name out of your ad text. Using a competitor's trademark in the ad copy invites a complaint and gives them a process to use against you. Google's trademark policy is explicit that it will investigate complaints about trademark use in ad text, with limited exceptions for resellers and informational sites.

My general position is that defending your own name is close to mandatory once the arithmetic clears, and attacking theirs is optional. Do the first before you consider the second.

Where does this argument break down?

Three places worth naming, because the brand-defense advice gets repeated as though it were universal.

When your name is generic. "Bay Plumbing" is not a brand keyword, it is a service keyword with a place in front of it. Exact match will still pick up people who never heard of you, your conversion rate will look inflated, and you will be paying market rate for cold traffic while telling yourself it is defense.

When the ad is not actually above you. Screenshot before you spend. A competitor showing in a shopping unit, a Local Services Ad, or on a related query is not the same as a competitor sitting on your exact name, and the response to each is different.

When the brand click was never at risk. Someone searching your full name plus your city, on their phone, having been to your shop, is not being persuaded by a stranger's ad. Some share of your brand traffic would have found you anyway, and you cannot tell which share. That uncertainty is why the break-even arithmetic above should be run pessimistically rather than optimistically.

What do I do when someone is bidding on my name?

Run through this in order.

Search your own name in an incognito window and record what you see. Screenshot it. Do it on a phone as well, since the mobile results page pushes organic listings further down.

Launch a brand campaign on exact match with a small daily budget. Write the ad so it is obviously you, with your phone number, your area, and your actual offer.

Send the click to the page that best answers what a person searching your name wants, which is usually contact and proof rather than a service pitch. If your traffic tends to want a conversation, live chat and chatbots are worth a look, with real limits on how much they help a small business.

If a competitor is using your trademark inside their ad text, file the trademark complaint with Google. It is a form and it sometimes works.

Then check that you can actually catch what you keep. Brand searchers frequently want to call, and call-only campaigns for service businesses skip the website entirely for exactly that intent.

What to do this week

Search your business name, your name plus your city, and your name plus your main service. Incognito, on a phone. Write down every ad above your listing.

Open Google Search Console and pull your branded query impressions for the last three months. That is the volume you are arguing about, and most owners have never looked at it.

Run the break-even arithmetic above with those impressions, your average job value and your gross margin. If the answer is under a job or two a month, set up the brand campaign this week. It is a thirty-minute build and the smallest budget in the account.

Add your competitors' names to your negative keyword list unless you have decided to target them deliberately. Otherwise broad matching will spend your money on them without you choosing to.

Repeat the search monthly. Who bids on your name changes, and it changes fastest right when you get busy enough to be worth targeting. Doing this yourself is realistic, and what managing ads yourself actually takes is worth reading before you commit to it.

Questions about who is bidding on your name?

Email me at eric@seod.com with your business name and your city. I will run the search from outside your network, on desktop and mobile, and send you back screenshots of exactly who is showing above you and whether I think it is worth defending.

Takes me five minutes. If nothing is showing, I will tell you to save your money, which is the outcome about half the time.

Or keep reading more on paid search for local businesses.