The question almost always comes up at the same moment. A client opens Auction Insights, sees a competitor appearing on their branded queries, and asks whether they should report them. Or the opposite: they want to do it themselves and ask whether they are taking a risk.
The short answer is that it is allowed, and that almost everyone misunderstands where the line actually is.
The line is not between “you can” and “you cannot” bid on a competitor’s name. It is between the keyword and the ad copy. Two things that coexist in the same account interface but, from a policy perspective, belong to two very different worlds.
The keyword is unrestricted, the ad copy is not
Google’s trademark policy applies to ad copy and the display URL. It does not apply to keywords. Google does not investigate or restrict which trademarks you add as keywords, for the simple reason that users never see your keyword list: they see the ad.
So you can add your most direct competitor’s name right now. No system will stop you.
The friction starts when that trademark appears in a headline, description, or display URL, and the trademark owner files a complaint. At that point, the ad may be restricted. Not before. Enforcement is complaint-based, not preventive. That is exactly why you can search for almost any well-known trademark and find competitors positioning themselves above it.
There is one detail that almost nobody knows, and it changes the risk assessment. Since July 24, 2023, a trademark complaint has a limited scope: it affects only the advertisers and ads explicitly identified in the complaint. It does not block the entire industry. This means that the fact that one of your competitors is using a trademark in their copy without consequences tells you nothing about the risk you face, and vice versa.
There are also trademarks that appear on restricted lists and cannot be targeted as keywords at all. Certain pharmaceutical names, certain luxury brands. There is no public list you can consult: you discover it by trying to add the keyword and seeing whether it gets flagged.
And from a legal perspective?
Here we need to make the distinction once again, because platform policy and the law are not the same thing, and neither one protects you from the other.
In the United States, the issue is essentially settled in favor of advertisers: purchasing a competitor’s trademark as a keyword does not, by itself, constitute infringement, and recent case law has moved in that direction. What remains challengeable is an ad that confuses users about the origin of the service or suggests a relationship that does not exist.
In Europe, the reasoning is similar but comes through a different route. Use of another party’s trademark is legitimate when it is necessary to identify the trademark owner’s products in order to make a genuine comparison, and becomes unlawful when the normally informed user cannot understand whether the advertised offer comes from the trademark owner or from a third party. The criterion, essentially, is confusion. Not the competitor’s annoyance.
There is another layer to watch out for. If your landing page compares your offer with that of the competitor whose keyword you purchased, you are no longer simply doing brand bidding. You are engaging in comparative advertising, and you must comply with all the requirements governing its legality under Italian Legislative Decree 145/2007. This is a step that many campaigns take without realizing it, because the landing page is written by someone who has never read the policy, while the policy is read by someone who never looks at the landing page.
The cost is the part nobody calculates
There is a reason brand bidding looks great in presentations and terrible in a P&L.
A click on someone else’s trademark costs a multiple of a click on your own. Obvious: your Quality Score for that query is low, the ad is less relevant, the landing page is less relevant, and the trademark owner has a structural advantage in the auction. You are paying more for a user who has already explicitly expressed a preference for someone else.
That does not mean it is wrong. It means you need to evaluate it using the right math. The question is not how much the click costs, but how much it costs to acquire a customer who was actively searching for the competitor, and how often that customer actually converts.
In some markets, it works extremely well. Software with low switching costs. Services where the price difference is obvious and verifiable. Categories where the market leader has a known service problem. In others, it is money burned with surgical precision.
It is also worth noting that the value is not entirely in the immediate conversion. Appearing when someone searches for your competitor puts you directly into the comparison stage of the buying process, and that stage increasingly takes place elsewhere too: on comparison sites, in reviews, and increasingly inside answers generated by AI assistants. A well-built comparison page stops being merely a paid-media asset and becomes a visibility asset.
How to build a campaign that does not create problems
Keep ad groups targeting competitor brands separate from generic ones. Always. You need this for budget control, but above all because, in the event of a complaint, you need to be able to isolate and pause a precise segment within ten minutes.
Write the assets for responsive search ads manually. The most concrete risk today is not that you accidentally write the competitor’s name: it is that an automated system writes it for you. Automated asset generation and dynamic keyword insertion can cause the trademark contained in the query to appear in the copy. Control needs to be taken away from automation precisely where the copy is legally sensitive.
Do not send the traffic to your homepage. Someone searching for a competitor wants an answer to a specific question, and the homepage does not answer any specific question. You need a comparison or alternative page, written using verifiable and dated data.
And never say, anywhere along the journey, anything that suggests a commercial relationship, partnership, or authorization that does not actually exist.
When the competitor is bidding on you
The opposite situation happens more often and generates more phone calls.
The first question to ask is not how to stop them, but how much it is costing you. Auction Insights in your branded campaigns tells you who is appearing and with what impression share. The Ads Transparency Center shows you the creatives that are actually running. You need both, because one tells you about presence and the other tells you about content.
If the competitor is buying the keyword but not using your trademark in the copy, you do not have a policy violation to point to. You have an auction problem. The response is to protect your branded queries, which remain the traffic that converts best and costs the least. If you do not do it, someone else will.
If, on the other hand, your trademark appears in their ad copy, you have the option of filing a complaint. Document it first: screenshots with the date, query, device, and geographic area. This is useful for the complaint and would still be useful if the matter were to continue on a different legal track.
In summary
Buying a competitor’s brand as a keyword is allowed. Writing it in the ad is the line that, following a complaint, Google may enforce. Comparing yourself with that competitor on the landing page is comparative advertising and has its own rules, which are stricter than the platform’s rules.
Three levels, three different assessments. Most mistakes happen because people treat them as one.
This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.
