What is brand bidding?
Updated May 2026
Brand bidding happens when a third party, such as an affiliate, a competitor, or an unauthorized reseller, runs paid ads on your brand's keywords in search engines.
When someone searches for your brand name, they expect to see your official ad at the top of the results. Brand bidders disrupt this by placing someone else's ad there instead, or alongside yours, increasing competition and driving up your cost-per-click (CPC).
Why does it happen?
Affiliates bid on brand terms because branded keywords convert at extremely high rates. A user searching your brand name is already looking for you and they are ready to buy. Affiliates intercept this intent, route users through their tracking links, and collect commission on sales you would have made anyway.
What does it look like?
Brand bidders are usually visible in the results: their ad appears on your branded keyword and points to their own page or to yours. The more deceptive variant is ad hijacking, where the ad is made to look exactly like your official ad, with your brand name in the headline and your website as the destination, and the only difference is a hidden redirect chain in between that captures the attribution.
How does adment detect it?
adment continuously crawls search engines from multiple locations and devices, simulating real user behavior. When a brand bidding ad is detected, adment captures the ad title and description, the display and destination URLs, the full redirect chain, screenshots of the ad as it appeared, the keyword, country, device and search engine, the time of detection, and any affiliate parameters found in the destination URL.
What should I do when I find a brand bidder?
Use the Assign and manage cases workflow in the Ad Hijackers tab to document the violation, then take it up directly with the affiliate or partner responsible, or with your legal team where the brand bidder is not a partner at all.