Online Brand Monitoring

What it does

Our online brand monitoring looks for the places where your brand is being used without your consent: lookalike domain names, clone websites, counterfeit or grey-market listings on marketplaces, impersonating accounts on social media and copycat apps. It does this on an ongoing basis, so new registrations are picked up early and not only when a customer reports them.

The system produces detections, not decisions. Each detection is scored and shown to you in the client portal, and an attorney reviews what matters. How the process works in legal terms is explained in the article on how brand monitoring works.

Functions

Domain name discovery

Lookalike domain names are collected from six independent sources: ICANN zone files, Certificate Transparency logs, feeds of newly registered domain names, probing of country-code TLDs, passive DNS and threat intelligence. Using several sources matters because each one misses names the others catch. A name that is not yet in a zone file may already have a certificate, for example.

Input: your brand names, marks and domain names. Output: a list of candidate domain names with the source in which each was found.

Similarity and typo scoring

Each candidate is scored against your brand. The score takes into account lookalike spellings, typing mistakes, added words, hyphens, homoglyph substitutions and other permutations. The point is to rank candidates, so that a name which only shares some letters with your mark does not take the same attention as an obvious imitation.

Logo similarity and clone detection

Where a candidate resolves to a website, the system compares the logo with yours and detects whether the site is a copy of your own. Visual similarity is assessed separately from the name. A site with a harmless domain but your logo and layout is flagged, as is a lookalike name with unrelated content.

Campaign linking

Copycat sites are linked to each other when they belong to the same operator or campaign. A single phishing site can be one of dozens, and seeing the connection helps the attorney decide whether to take down one site, several, or to go for a stronger measure.

Marketplace and social media monitoring

The major marketplaces, among them Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Temu and Etsy, and more than twenty social platforms, among them Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, YouTube and LinkedIn, are monitored for listings, accounts and posts that use your marks. Authorised sellers can be recorded so that they are not flagged again and again.

Five channels in the client portal

Detections are grouped in five channels: marketplaces, social media, websites, domain names and app stores. You review them in the client portal and tell us whether to oppose, investigate or dismiss. Your instruction, and what was done, stays with the detection.

Deep technical scan

For a suspicious domain name, a technical scan collects the information an attorney needs: where the site is hosted, which registrar holds the name, how it was set up and what it shows. The result feeds the notice, or the complaint we prepare.

Where a lawyer checks: the attorney confirms that the mark is registered for the relevant goods, that the use is without consent, and that a seller flagged as unauthorised is not in fact a licensed partner. Each check is recorded with the detection.

What you receive

You receive a prioritised list of detections in the client portal, grouped by channel, each with the evidence the system collected and a recommendation. Periodic summaries show what was found and what was done.

Every detection that leads to action is reviewed by an attorney first. The attorney decides whether a use is infringing, whether the seller is authorised and what the proportionate response is. Nothing is sent to a platform, registrar or third party without an attorney's sign-off.

A matter from start to finish

A Ghent brand supplies its names and marks. Within a day the discovery sources return candidates, among them a hyphenated name registered the previous night. The scoring ranks it high, the logo comparison finds the brand's logo on the site and campaign linking connects it to two other sites. The detection appears in the portal under websites. The client instructs us to act, the attorney confirms the facts and the technical scan identifies the host and registrar. Once the attorney confirms, the notice goes out through our takedown process.

Where it is used

Monitoring is the base of brand monitoring and online enforcement. When a detection needs action, the next step is our takedown workflow, or the preparation of a complaint under the UDRP or other domain name procedures in a domain name dispute.

It supports brand policy compliance by finding partners who use your marks outside the agreed channels, see the article on distribution and reseller agreements. And for clients with a brand TLD in the new gTLD programme, it watches for abuse and lookalikes around the new namespace, see the overview of ICANN's 2026 round.