Every brand's name is also a keyword. And on Amazon, keywords get bid on, contested, and sometimes stolen outright. That's the reality Market Defense laid out in a new breakdown of what the company calls search term warfare: the fight over branded search terms that cost brands ad spend, conversions, and, in some cases, their own customers.
"Bidding on a competitor's branded terms is completely allowed by Amazon," said Amy Rudgard, SVP of Client Strategy at Market Defense. "It's a legitimate, everyday tactic." Where it crosses into infringement, she said, is when a seller stops competing on the ad and starts trading on the trademark itself to profit.
What does it look like when a brand starts losing this fight? "We start to see brands decline in branded search traffic. We start to see brands lose organic ranking. We start to see competitors appearing in positions that used to belong to them," said Vanessa Kuykendall, Chief Engagement Officer at Market Defense. "And we start wondering why, especially when the brand hasn't lost any ground in reviews, hasn't had a social media scandal, hasn't had anything that would affect consumer sentiment."
Often, Kuykendall said, the answer is simpler than brands expect: Competitors are coming in and taking those spots. Sometimes brands end up in this position because they assumed their branded terms were untouchable in the first place. "If you're Summer Fridays, you probably assume that when a consumer searches 'Summer Fridays jet lag mask,' they're always going to choose you," she said. "But your consumer may choose the product that ships to them faster or is lower priced. You can't assume that you own those branded search terms just because a shopper started there." Her advice is to build the moat before the decline shows up in the data, because by the time it does, a competitor has usually been chipping away for a while.
Rudgard pointed to a case that showed exactly how far that line can be crossed. A brand with an iconic green-and-white package found that a rogue overseas seller had created a near-identical box, changing only the first letter of the name, so the product looked nearly indistinguishable and had copied the same product name. The seller then began advertising in violation of the original brand's terms.
Amazon allows brands to bid on each other's branded terms, but using a brand's registered mark, protected designs, or product names steps into a different category entirely. "That's trademark infringement and counterfeiting," Rudgard said. "They're copying the trade dress and trying to profit off someone else's brand equity to steal their customers." When a bad actor gains commercially off another brand's trademark, she added, the violation gets treated far more seriously.
The practical test for brand owners, according to Rudgard, is that legal bidding looks like a competitor running ads against your branded search using their own clearly differentiated brand and product. Infringement looks like a seller copying your packaging or trade dress, using your brand name inside their own title, content, or backend search terms, or passing a product off as yours. Amazon won't intervene on the first. The second is usually automatic once reported. "You build a case and report it to Amazon," Rudgard said. "They evaluate the infringement and if valid, should remove it.”
Market Defense's own category data shows what that fight looks like in practice. In the body wash category, Dove holds a 17% share of sales, ranks in the top 10 organically for nine terms, and roughly a third of its ad activity goes toward defending its own branded terms.
Rudgard said what's notable about Dove, Salt & Stone, and Naturium is that all three are doing something right, just in completely different ways, and that the more useful question isn't what each is doing wrong but when each should shift strategy.
"When you hold 17% of category sales and nine of the top 10 organic spots, you're the most obvious target in the room," Rudgard said of Dove. "Every competitor has an incentive to bid on your name and intercept your customers at the moment of purchase." That third of ad activity going toward branded terms isn't excessive in her view; it's appropriate. Where she'd push Dove instead is on making that spend work harder: leaning further into competitor conquesting, using its Amazon store and landing pages to control the shopper's journey to a brand-owned destination, and layering in DSP to retarget the large pool of shoppers already searching its name. "Defense alone doesn't build share," Rudgard said.
Salt & Stone is the brand Rudgard held up as a model of efficiency, and also a warning. At about a third of Dove's sales share and roughly double the price point, the brand is doing a lot with very little spent on branded defense, but its own data suggests its terms are under serious attack while it isn't fighting hard to defend them. The irony, Rudgard said, is that Salt & Stone's own ad activity leans heavily into conquesting other brands' terms, proof the tactic works. "They need to practice what they preach," she said, recommending the brand watch closely which competitors are conquesting its name and build out sponsored product, sponsored brand, and video campaigns to push them back off its own terms. Market Defense has seen its own clients consistently win sales directly off Salt & Stone's branded terms, Rudgard said, exactly the sort of leak a defensive strategy is meant to close.
Naturium, meanwhile, is doing something Rudgard called impressive. Without the category longevity of a Dove or an Aveeno, the brand pushed into the top 20 organically, gained 55% more search visibility in 26 weeks, and posted a 95% lift across body wash terms overall, roughly three times Dove's gain, largely by leaning hard on Sponsored Brand video ads. That's also where Rudgard flagged its biggest vulnerability: The brand has built real equity fast but has only a small amount of branded defense in place so far. "As they become a more prominent name in the category, they will become a bigger target," she said. Her advice is to start building that defense infrastructure now, while the brand still has the luxury of doing it proactively rather than reactively.
Asked who's actually winning, Rudgard didn't hand the category to any one brand outright. Dove wins on absolute share, she said, but carries the most expensive fight to maintain and should be focused on truly owning its customer's journey on Amazon rather than just defending it. Salt & Stone has built an efficient business but isn't protecting its own brand nearly as hard as it's attacking others' brands. Naturium is winning on momentum, the most exciting position in the category right now, but momentum without defense is temporary. "The ground they still need to make up is on protecting what they've built," Rudgard said.
Not every brand should try to outspend its way to defense, according to Karlsven. He described a skincare client caught in an escalating bidding war with competitors over its own branded terms, one that pushed cost-per-click up to $8-$9 just to protect the brand name.
Instead of continuing to outbid everyone for 100% impression share, an unsustainably expensive strategy, the team deliberately lowered its bids. That forced competitors to spend more to win the same placements. Because those competitors weren't converting the traffic well enough to justify the higher cost, they eventually paused their campaigns and backed off. Once they exited, defending the brand terms got much cheaper.
"You can't always win a branded-term war by outspending," Karlsven said. "Sometimes lowering bids makes the fight too painful for competitors, and they retreat."
Infringement doesn't always look as obvious as a copied logo. Rudgard pointed to a subtler pattern Market Defense has flagged repeatedly: resellers listing products under their own brand name combined with the real, authorized brand name, creating confusion over ownership within Amazon's catalog. That confusion can complicate things for the actual brand when it eventually tries to list and sell on Amazon itself, especially when a distributor or unauthorized seller got there first.
"We've seen it impact search, in which a product name is searched for including the reseller's name in the term," Rudgard said. "That's absolutely a trademark issue, but it often isn't caught by Amazon's system."
Amazon also prohibits brands from folding a competitor's keywords into their own titles or backend search terms, though enforcement gets harder as brand names get less distinctive. A name like Fenty is easy for Amazon's automated systems to flag. A name like The Ordinary is a different story, Rudgard said, one that's far easier for a bad actor to use as cover while targeting the skincare brand of the same name.
Most brands report spending around 20% of their ad budget on branded terms, a number Market Defense's own data suggests can climb much higher for the biggest players. Karlsven said there's no single right answer, since the correct allocation depends on how hard a brand's terms are actually being attacked.
"Many brands report that they spend about 20% on branded terms, and that is certainly a comfortable amount," Karlsven said. "However, in the case of a brand like Dove, they are likely having to spend way more than 20%, maybe 30% or more, given how much that comprises their total ad activity. It would make sense, as a highly searched brand and a top seller, [that] they have more to defend." On the other end, he said, brands like Salt & Stone and Ouai appeared to be under-indexing, likely spending less than 20% on branded terms and putting more of their budget toward competitor and nonbranded search instead.
For a challenger brand under-indexing on defense, the risk isn't simply losing a single sale, according to Rudgard. "Allowing competitors to take customers away isn't just a one-time problem; it can result in a customer making the switch to a completely new brand," she said. Brands need to weigh the lifetime value of each customer against whatever they're saving by not defending their terms. Market Defense's own approach starts with analyzing which branded terms pull in the most traffic and which are under the heaviest attack, then locking down the top of page first, since that's where most sales happen. "Sponsored Brand ads [ the banner placements that run at the top of Amazon's search results] have a lot of top of page exposure and help ensure the brand is highly visible on the terms that matter most," Rudgard said.
Sponsored Brand ads, came up repeatedly as the tool brands most often leave undefended. Karlsven said roughly 70% of Amazon sales happen at the top of the page, and most brands are already well covered on Sponsored Products through auto and broad campaigns, but frequently skip Sponsored Brand video ads entirely.
He added that Amazon's algorithm currently favors Sponsored Brand ads, and running them increases the odds that a brand's Sponsored Product ads also win featured placements. Skip Sponsored Brand ads entirely, and a competitor can use that same gap against a brand in more ways than one.
DSP, Amazon's programmatic advertising platform, often gets pitched as a competitor-targeting tool, but Rudgard said its real strength lies closer to home. Brands with heavy brand search demand, like Dove, have the most to gain from using DSP to retarget and cross-sell to shoppers who already searched for them, turning existing brand demand into repeat purchases rather than chasing new ones.
"For direct head-to-head competitor conquesting," Rudgard said, "often this is more successful via advertising on a competitor's brand name or product name in PPC search ads or via display ads on specific PDP pages of a competitor." In other words, DSP tends to work best defending and expanding a brand's own base rather than attacking someone else's.
Shelley Swallow, VP of Brand Protection at Market Defense, said trademark infringement is by far the most common issue brands run into, and one of the most damaging. "Resellers may use a brand's trademarks and other intellectual property in their listings, which can create customer confusion and cause brand dilution," Swallow said.
Trademark issues are only one piece of a broader picture. Market Defense groups brand infringement into four categories: trademark infringement, which covers unauthorized use of a brand's name, logo, or trade dress; copyright infringement, which covers copied product images, A+ Content, listing copy, or packaging design; patent infringement, which shows up most often in dupe culture, where a competitor's product closely mimics a patented design; and counterfeiting, the most severe of the four, where a seller passes off fake goods as the genuine branded product. Counterfeiting is what Amazon's Brand Registry and Project Zero programs were created primarily to combat.
The damage doesn't stay contained to Amazon, either. When resellers use a brand's intellectual property to list and discount products on other platforms, it can trigger Buy Box suppression back on Amazon itself. "When that happens, the impact can be immediate, resulting in lost sales and reduced visibility on Amazon," Swallow said.
When a brand suspects infringement, Swallow said the first move is almost always the same: file a complaint through Amazon Brand Registry. "That allows the brand to address the immediate infringement occurring on Amazon," she said.
The catch is Brand Registry only reaches what's happening on Amazon itself. Resellers misusing a brand's intellectual property on other marketplaces or websites need to be addressed separately, and that off-Amazon activity can still ripple back onto Amazon's platform. "If a reseller is using the brand's IP to sell or discount products elsewhere, it can contribute to Buy Box suppression on Amazon, which can result in an immediate loss of sales," Swallow said. That's why Market Defense pushes brands to treat protection holistically, watching for misuse across the broader marketplace rather than just inside Amazon's own walls.
For brands starting from zero, Karlsven said the first step is understanding how Amazon's auto-suggest actually behaves on a brand's own name. Roughly 10% of a brand's branded keywords tend to drive more than 90% of its branded traffic and sales, and that 90-10 split shifts whenever Amazon's auto-suggest results change.
"Knowing how customers search your brand and what Amazon auto-suggests tells you where to focus," Karlsven said. His practical advice is to prioritize by search volume instead of trying to cover every possible term, which spreads a defense budget too thin. Then, lock down the handful of highest-volume keywords and products above the fold using both Sponsored Product and Sponsored Brand ads. Getting those top terms solid across both ad types, he said, is the real starting point.
Karlsven doesn't expect the pressure to ease up. Big, well-funded brands that were historically hands-off about their own branded search are now getting far more deliberate, both about defending their own terms and about going after competitors.
"Historically, big brands were fairly unintentional on Amazon: there'd be significant brand search volume they either didn't protect or didn't bother defending against competitors," Karlsven said. "Now those larger brands are putting far more money into both conquesting competitors and protecting their own brand terms. Their big budgets have shifted the whole dynamic."
His advice heading into next year: Expect more aggressive, better-funded competition over branded search, whether a brand has noticed it yet or not.
Market Defense isn't waiting for that pressure to force clients' hands. "We are advising brands to leverage offsite media such as influencer, paid search and social, DOOH, and other brand media levers to offset the branded search decline and take full control of their marketing funnel," said Jonathan Wilner, SVP of Commerce Media at Market Defense. The agency is also shifting client spend into DSP from other on-site tactics, he said, to support both the top and bottom of the funnel at once rather than treating branded defense and demand generation as separate budgets.
