Someone's Bidding On Your Own Community Name
Search Engine Journal published a walkthrough this week on catching affiliates who bid on brand terms they were never supposed to touch. The mechanics: define what counts as a violation, build a list of search terms to test, screenshot the ads that show up, and match the offenders back to your partner list.
Translate that to leasing and it gets uncomfortable fast. You pay an ILS a placement fee. Some of them, or their ad networks, also run paid search on your community's actual name, the one people type in when they already know who you are. You end up bidding against your own vendor for your own branded traffic, and your CPC goes up to pay for the privilege of finding you.
The tell is in Auction Insights, not your dashboard. Your CRM will happily report the lead as a "Google" source and call it a day. It doesn't know or care who paid for the click that got there. So pull impression share and top-of-page rate for your exact property name in Google Ads, then look at who else shows up in the auction. If a listing site or lead aggregator is sitting there next to you on a search for your own brand, that's not competition. That's a partner charging you twice.
Worth doing quarterly, not once. Contracts get renegotiated, campaigns get handed to new agencies, and nobody tells you when the rules change on their end. If you find it, don't just email support. Put it in front of whoever renews that contract, because that's the leverage point, not the help desk.
Source: Search Engine Journal, September 24, 2026
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