Open a browser you are not signed into and search your own business name. Look at what sits above your website.
For a lot of contractors, the answer is Angi, Thumbtack, or a lead marketplace running a paid ad against their own name. Somebody typed your company into Google specifically because they wanted you, and the first thing they saw was a page selling them to your competitors.
Most owners have never checked. It takes thirty seconds.
You probably cannot stop it
This is the part worth accepting early, because a lot of effort gets wasted fighting it.
Bidding on a competitor's brand name as a keyword is legal in the United States and permitted by Google's own policy. It has been settled since the 2004 case of 1-800 Contacts v. Lens.com, and Google's trademark policy explicitly lists using trademarks as keywords among the things it will not restrict on a complaint.
So a marketplace can load your business name into its keyword list today and nothing at Google will stop it.
Worth noting jurisdictions differ. In May 2026 the Delhi High Court ruled in Hindware Ltd. v. Google LLC that invisible keyword bidding on a registered Indian trademark does constitute infringement, with damages awarded and Google held not to be a neutral intermediary. That is India, not the US, and it does not change your position here.
What you can actually act on
One thing, and it is worth knowing precisely.
Your trademark cannot appear in their ad copy. Not in the headline, not in the description, not in the display URL. That restriction is real and enforceable, and a successful trademark complaint to Google will get the ad suspended.
So the distinction is keywords versus copy. The keyword list is unrestricted. The visible text is complaint-driven.
Look at the ad appearing above your name. If your business name is written in it, you have a complaint worth filing with Google's trademark team, and they typically review within a few business days. If your name appears nowhere in the visible ad and is simply the trigger behind it, there is no mechanism available to you.
One limitation: enforcement reaches specific advertisers identified by their URL, so a restriction applies to the domain you named rather than to everybody doing the same thing.
The defensive move, and its actual cost
You bid on your own name.
The economics here are better than people assume. Brand keyword costs per click typically run $3 to $8, against $15 to $30 or more for competitive category terms in the trades.
That is the cheapest traffic you will ever buy, and it is the highest-intent traffic in existence. Somebody typing your company name has already decided. You are not persuading them, you are preventing an interception.
The obvious objection
Why pay for a click you would have received for free?
Because you would not necessarily have received it. If a marketplace ad sits above your organic listing, a share of people click the first result, and some proportion of those never reach you at all. You are not buying traffic you already had. You are buying back the portion being diverted.
The honest counterpoint is that the diverted share is not 100%, so some of what you spend is indeed paying for clicks you would have won anyway. That is a real cost and it is why this decision depends entirely on whether anyone is actually bidding.
How to decide
Run the test first. Search your name, incognito, on a phone as well as a desktop, over a few days at different times, because ad rotation means one look is not conclusive.
If nothing is running against you, do not spend the money. Plenty of small local businesses in less competitive markets are simply not targeted, and defensive bidding against an empty auction is pure waste.
If a marketplace is consistently appearing, run a small exact-match campaign on your business name and its common misspellings. Budget is usually trivial because the volume is small and the quality score on your own name is high.
Then check the actual outcome. If branded clicks are cheap and converting well, keep it. If the cost per booked job from branded search is worse than your other channels, stop.
The free thing that helps more
Your Google Business Profile occupies space that paid ads cannot.
A complete profile with recent reviews, photographs, and services filled in produces a knowledge panel and a map pack presence on a branded search, which is visually dominant and which a marketplace ad cannot displace. For somebody searching your exact name, that panel with fourteen recent reviews next to it does more than an ad.
That work costs nothing, and unlike defensive bidding it keeps working when you stop paying.
The uncomfortable part
The reason marketplaces bid on your name is that it works. They are buying a customer who already chose you and reselling them, sometimes back to you as a lead.
That is legal, it is widely practised, and complaining about it changes nothing. What changes something is being unmissable on your own name: a complete profile, real reviews, and a site that clearly belongs to you.
Check today. Whatever you find, it is better to know than to assume.