Ask HN: Google displays trademark infringing ads after acknowledging complaint?

2 points

4 years ago

I'm sure our company is not the first one this has happened to, and I'm curious if others have experienced this and know what else we can do.

For over a month now, one of our competitors has advertising on Google search results using our company name in the ad text/title.

That is, if you search for OUR COMPANY, the first result is literally:

    Ad · https://competitor.example.com/
    OUR COMPANY - title copied from our company website

    $Competitor is blah blah blah

The ads are clearly deceptive and meant to misdirect people searching for our service.

We filed a Trademark complaint with ads-trademarks-support@google.com and today we received this response:

    We completed our investigation regarding OUR COMPANY in ads using the
    following display URL(s) that you identified in your complaint:
    competitor.example.com. Ads from the(se) URLs using the(se) trademark(s)
    in ad text should not display unless they comply with our Reseller and
    informational site policy or target countries and/or regions outside the
    scope of your trademark complaint.

From reading the e-mail, it seems like the problem should be resolved, however the offending ads are still being displayed whenever I search for OUR COMPANY. Has anybody else experienced this? What can we do next?