Understanding the Brand Bidders tab
Updated May 2026
The Brand Bidders tab shows every third party detected running ads on your branded keywords, regardless of whether they are an affiliate in your program. This includes competitors, unauthorized resellers, review sites, and any other entity bidding on your brand name in search engines.
How Brand Bidders differs from Ad Hijackers
Both tabs detect unauthorized ads on your branded keywords, but they represent different types of activity.
Ad Hijackers are affiliates who intercept your branded traffic through redirect chains, collecting commission on sales that would have come to you directly. They hide their activity using cloaking and redirects.
Brand Bidders are any third party running ads on your brand keywords and sending traffic directly to their own website or a page about your brand. They are not necessarily affiliates in your program and they are not hiding behind redirects. A competitor bidding on your brand name, a review site ranking your product, or an unauthorized reseller promoting your products are all brand bidders.
Because of this, the Brand Bidders tab typically contains significantly more detections than Ad Hijackers. Any entity bidding on your brand appears here, whether malicious or not.
The main table
The Brand Bidders table follows the same structure as Ad Hijackers with a few differences. The columns are:
- Affiliate ID : if the brand bidder is also a tracked affiliate in your program, their network and ID appear here. Most brand bidders will show No affiliate ID since they are often competitors or review sites rather than program affiliates.
- Domain : the website the ad leads to. Unlike Ad Hijackers which shows an advertiser name, Brand Bidders shows the destination domain directly since that is the most useful identifier for this type of activity.
- Detections : the total number of times this domain has been detected running ads on your branded keywords.
- Assigned to : the team member managing this case.
- Status : New, In Progress, Solved, or Muted.
- Source : the search engine where the ad was detected.
- Tag : the violation type. Brand Bidders has two tag options: Trademark abuse for entities using your brand name without authorization, and Competitor for known competing businesses bidding on your brand terms.
- First detected and Last detected : when the activity was first and most recently seen.
- Note : internal notes field.
Opening a brand bidding case
Clicking a row opens the case detail panel. This shows the same fields as an Ad Hijackers case, affiliate ID if available, advertiser name, status, assigned owner, keywords, countries, tags, note, source, and mute toggle.
The detected ads list at the bottom shows each individual ad instance with the landing page URL, keyword, country, source, device, tag, and detection date. Notice that Brand Bidders shows the landing page URL in this list rather than the ad title. This is because brand bidders send traffic directly to their own pages, so the destination URL is the most important identifier.
The detected ads list also includes a Redirect path filter, which lets you filter detections by whether a redirect was involved.
Opening an individual ad detection
Clicking a detection opens the Ad Details view showing the ad title, description, keyword, country, source, device, tag, and detection timestamp.
The key difference from Ad Hijackers at this level is the evidence section. Brand Bidders show a direct Ad destination link with no redirect path. This is because brand bidders send users straight to their own site rather than routing through affiliate tracking links. You will see screenshots of the ad in search results and the landing page, but no redirect chain documentation.