Brand defence: stop resellers outranking you on your own name

A traveller types your company name into Google. They already know you, they want to book with you — and the first thing they see is a reseller’s ad, sitting above your own result. If they click it, you have just paid commission on a booking you had already won. It is the cheapest booking you will ever recover, and the most infuriating to lose.

Why your own name leaks

Resellers and OTAs bid on your brand terms on purpose. Your name is a high-intent keyword with a ready-to-book audience, and it is cheap for them because the searcher was never going to buy from anyone else — the demand is yours, they are just standing in the doorway. If you are not running an ad on your own name, the top of the page is theirs by default, and your organic listing sits below the fold of a phone screen.

This is not a content problem or a ranking problem in the usual sense. You already rank first organically for your own name. The leak happens in the ad slots above that result, where the auction — not relevance — decides who appears.

What the leak actually costs

Two ways. First, direct: a booking that would have cost you nothing now carries a reseller commission, often fifteen to twenty-five percent. Second, indirect: the traveller lands in someone else’s booking flow, gets remarketed to, and may never come back to you directly again. You did the brand-building — the ads, the reviews, the word of mouth — and someone else monetises the last click.

The mock below is what the leak looks like on the page. The reseller’s ad takes the top slot; your result — the one the traveller actually wanted — sits underneath it.

How to defend the name

You defend a brand SERP by occupying it, top to bottom. Four moves, in order of effort:

1. Run a branded search campaign. An ad on your own name has a high quality score and a low cost per click, because the ad, keyword and landing page all match perfectly. It buys back the top slot a reseller would otherwise own, and it converts better than any other campaign you run.
2. Own the organic result with sitelinks. A strong branded organic listing with sitelinks — tours, contact, about — takes up far more vertical space and pushes competing listings down. This is free and permanent once earned.
3. File trademark complaints against ad-copy misuse. Where a reseller uses your trademarked name inside their ad headline or display URL in a way that implies they are you, that is a complaint Google will usually action — even when the bidding itself is allowed.
4. Monitor the SERP. Check weekly, respond fast, and pull your defensive ad back when the page is clean to save budget.

What is legal and what isn’t

Be honest with yourself about this: in most markets, bidding on your brand name as a keyword is legal, and you cannot make it stop. What crosses the line is using your trademarked name inside the ad text to impersonate you or imply an official relationship that does not exist. The first you fight by outranking and out-converting; the second you fight with a trademark complaint. Confusing the two wastes everyone’s time and gets complaints rejected.

Monitoring so it stays fixed

Brand defence is not a one-off fix — reseller budgets rise with the season and new advertisers appear without warning. Search your own name weekly from a clean, logged-out browser, note who is bidding, and keep your defensive campaign ready to switch on. The whole point is that this is the cheapest traffic you will ever touch: the traveller already chose you. All you are doing is making sure that, at the last click, they actually reach you.