What is Brand Bidding?

Brand bidding is an affiliate buying paid search advertising against an operator's own brand terms — running an ad on the casino's name, or on the name plus a word like bonus, login or review — so that the affiliate's link appears above the operator's own result. Almost every affiliate agreement prohibits it, and the reason is arithmetic rather than principle. Somebody typing an operator's name into a search engine has already chosen that operator. They were going to arrive anyway, at no cost. If an affiliate intercepts that click, the operator pays a commission on a player it had already won, and it may also end up bidding against its own partner in the same auction, raising the price of its own name. The prohibition normally extends to obvious misspellings, to the brand plus a generic modifier, and to display URLs containing the brand. The rule has an edge that gets people terminated. Broad match in a search platform will serve an ad on a brand query the affiliate never explicitly bought, so a campaign can breach the clause without anyone intending it; that is why compliant affiliates add the operator's brand terms as negatives rather than merely not bidding on them. A minority of programmes permit brand bidding for named partners under written approval, usually with landing-page and ad-copy conditions attached. For a reader, the practical significance is small but real: an ad that looks like an operator's own may be a third party's, and where it leads is a tracking link rather than the front door.