Google Ads trademark policy, explained plainly

Google’s trademark policy for Ads is narrower than most brand owners expect, and almost every question people bring to it comes back to a single distinction: where the trademark appears, not whether it’s used at all.

Google states it plainly — the trademark must be used in the ad, not only on the ad’s landing page. That sentence is the policy in miniature. A competitor’s landing page can mention your brand freely. What triggers a restriction is your mark sitting inside the ad text itself: the headline, the description, the parts a searcher reads before they click anything.

Everything else in the policy — what’s allowed, what’s restricted, the exceptions, how it’s enforced — is a set of conditions layered on top of that one location rule. Read the rest of this guide with that sentence in mind and most of it will already make sense.

Two uses of a trademark sit outside this policy entirely. Google names them specifically, so there’s no ambiguity about whether they count.

• Using a trademark as a keyword — an advertiser can target your brand name as a keyword and Google will not restrict that under this policy, regardless of who the advertiser is.
• Using a trademark in the second-level domain of the ad’s display URL — the visible part of the URL shown in the ad, not the landing page it points to.

Neither of those is a loophole or an oversight; Google states both as deliberate scope limits on what the policy covers. If a competitor is bidding on your brand term, or their display URL’s second-level domain includes your mark, that alone gives you nothing to report under this policy — the restriction lives elsewhere, in how the ad’s own text is written.

This is the part that trips up most rights holders on their first read: seeing a competitor’s domain or knowing they’ve targeted your keyword feels like the violation, because it’s the most visible signal. But visibility and policy scope aren’t the same thing. Google drew the line at the ad text specifically, so before you spend time building a case, confirm which side of that line the thing you’ve found actually sits on.

The restriction has two triggers, and only one requires a competitor relationship.

• A direct competitor using the trademark in the ad itself — the policy specifically calls out direct competitors placing a rights holder’s mark inside their own ad text.
• Any ad that uses the trademark in a way that is confusing, deceptive, or misleading — this trigger isn’t limited to competitors; it covers ad text that misleads a searcher about source, affiliation, or endorsement, whoever is running it.

In both cases the location rule from the first section still applies: the mark has to be in the ad. A landing page that mentions your brand, however prominently, isn’t what this restriction reaches — the ad text is.

The two triggers also don’t require the same evidence. For the first, you’re establishing a fact — is this advertiser a direct competitor, and is your mark literally present in their headline or description. For the second, you’re making a case — does the ad, as written, confuse or mislead a searcher about who they’re dealing with. The first is usually a screenshot. The second is a judgement call Google has to make, so the ad text needs to actually support that reading, not just annoy you.

Google carves out three legitimate uses it will not restrict, even when the ad text includes the mark. Each comes with conditions attached — the exception protects the use, not the advertiser, so it only holds if the specific conditions are met.

1. Reseller and related-product pages. The landing page must be primarily dedicated to selling, or clearly facilitating the sale of, the trademarked products or services, their components, replacement parts, or compatible products. It must give the searcher an actual way to buy, and show commercial information such as pricing. It must also be clear whether the advertiser is a reseller or purely an informational site — an ambiguous page doesn’t qualify.
2. Informational pages. This covers pages whose primary purpose is to give informative details about the trademarked product, or that serve as an index of search results about it — a comparison page, a review site, a specifications resource.
3. Descriptive use. A trademark used descriptively, in its ordinary dictionary meaning rather than as a reference to the brand, is not restricted. This applies to marks that are also common words used in their everyday sense.

None of these exceptions are self-certifying. They describe what the page has to actually be — dedicated to the sale, genuinely informational, or using the word in its ordinary sense — not what an advertiser calls it in their own defence.

This is a complaint-driven policy, not an automatic scan. Google accepts complaints only against specific advertisers identified by their URL, and only within the countries and industries where the trademark owner has demonstrated trademark rights — a complaint isn’t global by default, and it isn’t anonymous against “whoever is doing this.”

• Once Google restricts a mark for a given advertiser, that restriction generally carries forward on an ongoing basis to any ads that use the same second-level domain in their final URL — so the enforcement follows the domain, not just the one ad that was reported.
• Google issues a warning at least seven days before any account suspension over a trademark violation, giving the advertiser a window to fix the ad before losing the account.
• An appeal process exists for advertisers who believe a restriction was applied incorrectly.

One nuance worth separating out: this trademark policy does not govern the Business Name asset shown in an ad. Business Name sits under Google’s business information and brand-verification requirements — a different rule that also stops a competitor from claiming your brand as their verified business name, but through its own process rather than this one.

Google updates policy pages over time, and this one is no exception — provisions that applied in one region in the past aren’t guaranteed to still apply today. Treat this guide as a plain-English explainer of the current policy, and check Google’s own trademark policy page for the live wording before relying on it for a specific complaint.