BrandPatrol scans paid search for affiliates and hijackers running ads on your own branded keywords, follows the tracking link back to whoever placed it, and turns the whole thing into evidence your team can act on.
Built on public search results and the public ad-transparency record. No access to your accounts required.
Brand protection tools ask you to trust a dashboard. We'd rather show you exactly what's being checked and how.
A person who already typed your brand name into Google was already going to buy from you. An affiliate who buys an ad on that exact search intercepts the click first — and collects a commission for a sale you would have made anyway.
Someone typing your brand name into the search bar has already decided to buy from you — that's what a branded search means. An ad that intercepts that exact click, whether it's an affiliate in your own program or an unrelated hijacker, collects a commission on a sale you were going to make with or without it.
Every extra advertiser on your branded keyword is another bidder in that auction. When an affiliate or a hijacker starts competing for your own name, cost-per-click on that term rises for everyone still bidding on it — including you — on top of the commission handed to whichever ad wins the click.
Most affiliate agreements already prohibit bidding on the brand's own trademarked terms. The clause is only as good as its enforcement — and enforcement means someone actually checking search results for a breach, which is exactly the part that usually isn't happening.
Three steps, none of which need anything from your team while the scan runs.
For every branded keyword and close variant, we capture each paid ad actually shown on the results page — not organic listings — across the regions and devices you've scoped, on a schedule or as a single on-demand pass. Every ad we see is checked against your authorized-partner roster before anything is ever flagged.
Anything that isn't an approved partner gets its redirect chain followed hop by hop — search-engine click tracker, then the affiliate network's own tracking domain, then the landing page — so the affiliate ID and network come straight out of the tracking parameter, not a guess based on the ad's display URL.
Timestamped SERP and landing-page screenshots, the affiliate ID and network, the full redirect path, and the country and device it was seen on land in one case record with a status — new, in progress, solved, or muted — that your team moves through, not a spreadsheet to reverse-engineer.
Every hijacker or brand-bidder case is built the same way, so your network can't argue with the shape of the evidence.
An illustrative example — the same fields every real case ships with.
Every real case carries the same shape as this one: a screenshot of the ad as it appeared on the results page, a screenshot of where the link actually lands, the affiliate ID and network pulled from the tracking parameter, and a status your team moves through a workflow — new, in progress, solved, or muted. Nothing here is summarized or paraphrased on your behalf; what's in the case is what a shopper saw and exactly where their click went.
Checking your brand name by hand, or buying a broad brand-protection tool, both work up to a point. Here's where the mechanics differ.
| What matters | Checking manually / in-house | Generic brand-protection suite | BrandPatrol |
|---|---|---|---|
| Branded-keyword SERP coverage across regions & devices | Whichever regions and devices a person has time to search from | Usually a fixed region set defined at onboarding | Regions and devices you choose, checked on the schedule you set |
| Redirect chain traced to affiliate ID | No — a manual click-through rarely resolves every hop | Not usually the focus — most watch domains and listings, not affiliate redirects | Yes — every hop, through to the affiliate ID and network |
| Roster cross-check to suppress approved partners | No — depends on someone checking a spreadsheet by hand | Not usually included — partner rosters aren't something these tools ingest | Yes — checked against your roster before a case is ever raised |
| Evidence package a network will accept | Whatever screenshots and notes someone thought to save | Varies by vendor and report format | Timestamped SERP + landing-page shots, affiliate ID, network, redirect chain, region, and device — same fields every case |
| Ongoing vs. one-off | One-off, whenever someone has time to look | Usually a standing subscription | Either — a one-time snapshot audit or continuous monitoring |
| Setup effort | None to start — but no structured coverage either | Onboarding call plus vendor-side configuration | A domain and a keyword list; the onboarding wizard proposes a starting keyword set for you to edit |
Brand protection carries its own jargon. Here's what the terms on this page — and on our features page — actually mean.
An affiliate already inside your program buying a paid-search ad on your own brand name or a close misspelling, then collecting commission on a sale that would have reached you anyway. Most affiliate agreements already prohibit it.
An advertiser with no relationship to your brand at all running a paid-search or shopping ad on your name — often pointing to a competing product, a counterfeit, or a lookalike site. There's no affiliate agreement to enforce here, only the ad platform's own policy.
Trademark bidding is choosing your brand name as the keyword that triggers an ad — what BrandPatrol's hijacker and brand-bidder detection are built to catch. Trademark-in-ad-copy is your brand name appearing inside the ad's visible text regardless of which keyword triggered it — a related but separate problem. Coming soon
A code embedded in an affiliate's link that tells the network which partner to pay if the click turns into a sale. It's what BrandPatrol reads out of a redirect chain to identify exactly who placed a brand-bidding ad.
The sequence of URL hops a click actually travels between the ad on the results page and the page that finally loads — typically a search-engine click tracker, then an affiliate network's tracking domain, then the destination. The affiliate ID usually shows up partway through, not in the final URL.
The list of an affiliate program's currently authorized partners, maintained by the brand. Every detection is checked against it first, so a partner who's actually allowed to bid on branded terms is never raised as a violation.
An affiliate sending traffic straight from an ad to the brand's own site, skipping the affiliate's own content or comparison page entirely. Many programs restrict it outright — combined with brand bidding, it means the affiliate added nothing beyond intercepting a search that was already headed to the brand.
Tell us your domain and the keywords that matter. We'll scope the monitoring and quote based on your program size.
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