Your customers type your business name into Google. Sometimes the first thing they see is a rival's AD. A 2-minute check, and the one fix for each result.
1Search yourself like a stranger
Open this page in a private / incognito window first, so the results aren't tuned to you. Search from where your customers are.
Ads change by time of day, budget and place. One clean search doesn't prove nobody is there: check a few times this week, at different hours.
2What's at the top?
A rival is on your name. The fix:
Note their website, then look them up in Google's Ads Transparency Center (search their name or website). It shows the ads they run; it doesn't show which keywords they buy, so your own search is the real check.
Run your own small ad on your exact business name, pointing to your own site, so you sit above them. In a Bing study of thousands of brands, brands that skipped their own ad lost 18-42% of those clicks to rivals; brands with their own ad on top lost 1-5%. (Different brands, so read it as a pattern, not a promise.)
Their ad text uses your registered trademark? Google restricts that and has a trademark complaint process. Buying your name as a keyword alone is allowed by Google's policy.
Nobody's there. The fix: save the money.
In the same study, with no rival present, a brand's own ad added only 1-4% more clicks (those were big brands; smaller ones gained a bit more). Usually not worth paying for every day.
Check again next month (and after any new competitor opens nearby).
Something outranks your own name. The fix starts with your listing:
Claim and complete your Google Business Profile: exact name, category, hours, photos, and replies to reviews.
Make your website's page title say your exact business name and city.
Still stuck? Reply to my DM with your name and city and I'll tell you why.
3Searching for a shop yourself?
Tap the result that matches the name word for word, not the one marked AD or Sponsored. In a UK regulator's test, only about half of search users knew the top "sponsored" results were paid ads (Ofcom, 2025): over-65s 59%, 16-24s 37%.
The case behind it
From 2015 to 2021 an Arizona law firm bought the name of a bigger rival, "Lerner & Rowe", as a Google Ads keyword. Its ads showed near the top when people searched that name and never mentioned it. Google's data for 2017-2021: shown 109,322 times, clicked 7,452 times. One intake log entry reads "Google. Thought we were L&R." Lerner & Rowe sued and lost: the courts found confusion unlikely, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case (27 May 2025).