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If brand bidding never existed

1 November 2026 · Joss Froggatt

A few years ago I reluctantly ran a brand holdout test for a hotel client. Four weeks with brand search switched off, so we could finally answer the question every CFO asks sooner or later: why are we paying for people who were already looking for us?

That test lasted a week.

PPC attributed revenue dropped by around 30% in those first seven days. The online travel agents didn’t wait around. As soon as we stepped back they stepped in, and guests who’d typed the hotel’s own name into Google booked through someone else, with a commission attached. (That commission being significantly higher than a Brand CPC). We switched brand back on and vowed never to repeat it.

That test stuck with me, because the hotel was easy to find. Its website sat generally at the top of the organic results. What the ads were actually buying was a small bit of space between the guest and the Online Travel Agencies (OTA’s, such as Booking.com, Expedia etc). So I keep wondering what search would look like if that space had never been open for all to bid on.

When did Google start allowing brand bidding?

I’d assumed paying for your own name was as old as paid search. But a touch of research reveals that it’s a bit younger than that, and it arrived on purpose.

Paying to appear in search results goes back to 1996, when Open Text tried selling “Paid Listings” and users mostly ignored them. The version we’d recognise, with advertisers bidding against each other on keywords, started in 1998, when GoTo.com let advertisers bid on how much they’d pay to appear at the top of results for specific searches. The trademark rows started within a year. In 1999, Playboy went after Netscape and Excite for showing rival adult banner ads to people who’d searched “playboy” or “playmate”.

GoTo, later renamed Overture, allowed trademarks as search terms when the use was appropriate, such as comparative advertising (ads naming a rival to show why you’re better). Google went the other way. When AdWords launched, Google honoured requests from brands to keep competitors off their trademarked names.

Then Google changed its mind, one region at a time:

So brand bidding crept in over six years, and every step forcing it appears to be a policy decision. Google’s own internal research, later quoted in a US court case, put trademarked keywords at about 7% of its total revenue at the point it loosened the rules.

Which means the world I’m imagining isn’t that far-fetched. If you held a UK trademark before May 2008, you could complain to Google and keep competitors off your name. I’m not in this club, but there are plenty of people still working in search remember it.

eBay and my hotel are both right

The most quoted brand holdout belongs to eBay. When it switched off brand keywords, researchers found the paid clicks were almost entirely replaced by free organic ones, and concluded that brand ads had no measurable short-term benefit.

Some people might wave that outcome about as proof that brand bidding is wasted money. My hotel test says the opposite.

Someone searching “ebay” had nowhere else to go. Someone searching for the hotel had Booking and Expedia sat right on top of the result, ready to take the booking. Brand ads earn their keep when a rival is in the auction. Take the rival away and your own brand campaign is probably worth about the same as eBay found; pretty much nothing.

Life without brand bidding

To start with, it’s cheaper. The brand line comes off the media plan. For a hotel the saving is bigger than the click cost, because every booking that the OTAs don’t intercept is a commission the hotel doesn’t pay on a guest who’d already chosen them. Not only that, but the potential guest has no opportunity to be tempted by another hotel if they don’t visit via an OTA.

Calmer too. Nobody’s checking auction insights every Monday to see who’s crept onto their name, or writing the awkward email to a “partner” who’s bidding against them.

The next bit is the one I likely care about most. The work done outside paid search would finally get its due. SEO earned the top organic spot. PR got the name into the papers. The TV spot, the word of mouth and the great stay a guest told their mates about all end in the same place: someone typing your name into Google. Right now that last step is up for auction. In this world it lands where all that work was pointing.

Fewer scams too. Fake “official site” ads love brand terms, because that’s where the trusting and highest intent clicks are. Take brand terms out of the auction and you take away a lot of their cover. It won’t end fraud, but it gives scammers less room to work in.

What we’d lose

This world has costs.

Conquesting goes. If you’re a challenger, showing up next to the market leader on its own name is one of the few chances you get to reach a buyer at the moment they’re choosing. The courts have some sympathy with this. In the long-running Interflora v Marks & Spencer case, the Court of Appeal said keyword advertising isn’t inherently objectionable and only crosses the line when it misleads people.

The mop-up goes with it. When a brand goes bust, people keep searching its name for months, and today a sharp competitor can quietly bid on it and catch them. In this world, that demand goes to whoever ranks.

And the top of the page still gets filled. This is the strongest argument against me. Take away brand ads and aggregators still rank organically for hotel names, marketplaces still rank for product brands, and Google has plenty of its own SERP features to slot in. You’d likely own a bigger share of your own traffic, but perhaps not all of it.

Where I land

I’ve gone back and forth on this, and I’d still opt for the world without brand bidding.

Losing conquesting hurts challengers, but there is a much bigger non-brand field to fight on: “hotels in Edinburgh”, “home delivery”, “running shoes for flat feet”. That’s where competition belongs for me. Someone typing your name has already picked you, and charging you to keep them is effectively a toll on your own front door.

The ones doing well out of today’s setup are the platform selling the toll and the middlemen big enough to pay it. The ones paying are the brands that built the demand, and in the end their customers, through the price of their hotel room.

Every brand budget is a tax return, but it’s filed to Google, and you get no deductions for having earned the demand yourself.