Affiliates are bidding on your brand terms. Here is the enforcement route that works.

Short answer: you cannot make Google stop an affiliate from bidding on your brand keywords — and chasing that is wasted budget. Google’s trademark policy restricts your mark in ad text and display URLs, not in keyword targeting: a complaint strips your name out of the ad copy, while the bidding itself stays perfectly allowed. What actually stops brand bidding is enforcement you control: an affiliate agreement with teeth, evidence that survives geo-cloaking, commission holds through the programme or network, a Google trademark complaint where the copy misuses your mark — and, for the operators who keep pretending they never signed anything, a counsel letter. In regulated markets the stakes are yours, not theirs: under UKGC and most EU licences, the operator answers for its affiliates’ advertising.

What is happening and why it costs you real money

Brand bidding is an affiliate buying search ads on “yourbrand”, “yourbrand casino”, “yourbrand promo code” — intercepting users who had already decided to visit you, and collecting a commission on a deposit that was coming anyway. The damage stacks three ways:

• You pay commission on traffic you owned. The player typed your name; the affiliate’s only contribution was standing between you and them.
• Your own brand CPC climbs. You are now outbidding your own partners in the auction for your own name.
• Compliance exposure. The intercepting ad and its landing page — bonus claims, misleading copy, wrong market — run under your licence in the eyes of the regulator.

The players most affected are exactly your highest-intent traffic, which is why brand bidding is the single most profitable violation an affiliate can commit — and the most common.

What Google will and will not do

You want	Google’s answer
Stop an affiliate bidding on “yourbrand” as a keyword	No. Keyword use of trademarks is expressly not restricted
Remove your trademark from their ad text / display URL	Yes — via a trademark complaint, if the use is not authorised
Ban “yourbrand promo code” style ads	Only if the ad text misuses the mark or the ad breaks other policies (misleading claims, gambling certification, geo)
Reveal who runs the ad	Partially — Ads Transparency Center shows the advertiser identity

Read that table once and the conclusion writes itself: Google is a cleanup tool for ad copy, not the venue where brand bidding is decided. The venue is your affiliate agreement.

The enforcement route that works

1. Put teeth in the affiliate terms. Prohibit bidding on the brand, its misspellings, “brand + bonus/promo/code/login” phrases, and brand-adjacent display URLs; extend the ban to all markets and all engines, not just google.com; state the penalty explicitly — commission forfeiture for the period of violation, then termination. A clause without a stated penalty is a suggestion, not a term.

2. Collect evidence that survives cloaking. Brand bidders geo-target markets where your team does not sit, run ads outside office hours, and exclude your office IPs. Screenshots must carry timestamp, geo (VPN or a monitoring service), the full ad, the display URL and the tracking chain to the affiliate ID. Two or three dated captures beat one angry email. The Ads Transparency Center entry for the advertiser completes the file.

3. Escalate inside the programme first. Send the file to the affiliate and the network with a commission hold pending review. Money moves behaviour faster than threats: most brand bidding stops at the first frozen payout. Repeat offenders get termination under the clause from step 1 — with forfeiture, which is why the clause matters.

4. File the Google trademark complaint in parallel — for the ad-text and display-URL misuse. It will not stop the bidding, but it strips your name from the intercepting ad, which collapses its click-through rate and makes the whole scheme uneconomic.

5. Counsel letter for the ones who “never got the memo”. A trademark / passing-off letter to the affiliate entity — and, where relevant, to the network — converts “grey-area growth hacking” into a documented legal risk. In our practice this is the step where the remaining holdouts stop.

6. If the “affiliate” is not actually yours — a fake bonus site, a clone landing page, an impersonating ad with no programme relationship — this is no longer an affiliate-compliance matter. That is impersonation, and it runs the clone-site takedown route: host and registrar filings, ad-platform impersonation complaints, deindexing. Finding where the fake site actually lives starts with the abuse-contact lookup.

The regulated-market angle most operators miss

In licensed markets the affiliate’s ad is, for regulatory purposes, your ad. UKGC has fined operators for affiliate marketing they claimed not to know about; the same logic runs through most EU regimes. This cuts both ways: it is your exposure — and your leverage. An affiliate reminded in writing that its brand-bid landing page misstates bonus terms under your licence tends to take the point quickly, because the alternative is you terminating them to protect the licence. Document that you police this: regulators treat an enforced affiliate policy as mitigation, and an unenforced one as decoration.

What this costs and what it returns

Brand-bid enforcement is one of the few legal projects with a direct, measurable ROI: reclaimed branded clicks at organic cost, commission not paid on intercepted deposits, and a visible drop in your own brand CPC — typically measurable within a month of the first commission hold. The monitoring is cheap; the agreement clause is a one-time fix; the letters are scoped per matter. An audit of your current brand SERP across markets — who bids, under which IDs, with which landing pages — is where an engagement starts.