Brand Protection Playbook (User-Friendly)

A practical guide for Brand, Marketing, Legal, and Trust & Safety teams to spot brand impersonation early and decide what to do next.

1) What is brand protection?

Brand protection is the work of finding and responding to places where someone is pretending to be your company. On the internet, that often starts with domains: websites and email addresses that look close enough to confuse customers. This kind of abuse is now routine—most organizations encounter lookalike domains sooner or later, whether or not they are actively monitoring.

In practice, impersonation usually shows up in a few common patterns:

• A small typo (googel.com)
• A lookalike character (paypaI.com using a capital “I”)
• A “support” or “login” variation (yourbrand-login.com, yourbrand-support.com)

Give us 5 minutes and we’ll help you understand what’s happening around your brand

Getting started is lightweight, and you don’t need deep security expertise. The point of the first run isn’t perfection—it’s quick visibility so you can make a calm, informed decision about whether monitoring is worth it.

In about 5 minutes, you can:

• Enter a brand name or website
• See real examples of lookalike domains
• Understand whether impersonation or abuse may already be occurring
• Decide whether ongoing monitoring is worthwhile

At this point, pick the path that matches how you like to work:

• Domain Discovery ↗ to quickly see what exists right now
• Brand Discovery ↗ if you want help identifying what to protect
• Watchlists ↗ when you’re ready for ongoing visibility

2) Why brand protection matters

Impersonation domains can lead to real operational work and real risk. The impacts are usually predictable, and they often show up before anyone calls it a “security incident.”

Common outcomes include:

• Fraud and phishing
• Customer confusion and support costs
• Lost revenue and reputational damage
• Legal exposure (misuse of trademarks, consumer harm, partner complaints)

The goal isn’t to catch everything immediately. The goal is to build a repeatable workflow that reliably surfaces the highest-risk abuses early.

3) How Domain Miner helps (in plain language)

Domain Miner is designed to help non-technical teams get to useful answers quickly. It focuses on two capabilities that map cleanly to day-to-day workflows:

• Discover domains that look or sound similar to your brand
• Monitor continuously so you’re alerted when new lookalike domains appear or when a quiet domain suddenly “goes live”

You don’t need to understand algorithms to use it effectively. The console is designed so you can start with safe defaults, get value quickly, and only use advanced settings if you have a specific reason.

4) How it works (step by step)

The workflow below is intentionally lightweight. You can start with a single brand name or website, and expand later once you see what shows up.

Step 1: Identify what you want to protect

Start with the names customers actually recognize. This gives you the best signal with the least effort:

• Your company name
• Top product names
• Key brand phrases or program names
• Common misspellings (the ones you see in support tickets or social)

If you’re not sure where to begin, start small with your primary brand name and expand later. There’s no wrong starting point.

If you want help generating a strong starting list, Brand Discovery ↗ can help identify brand assets worth protecting.

Step 2: Find lookalike domains

Use Domain Discovery ↗ to run a search for domains that could impersonate you. Think of this as a fast scan for “what exists right now,” using sensible defaults.

You can keep this high-level:

• Start with common zones like .com and your most important country domains
• Focus on results that include “intent words” like login, verify, support, secure, or account

Step 3: Turn useful searches into ongoing monitoring

Once you like the results you’re seeing, save the configuration as a Watchlist ↗. This gives you ongoing visibility without requiring you to remember to re-run searches.

This is how you go from “one-time research” to “always-on coverage.”

Step 4: Review suspicious domains and decide what action to take

When something is flagged, the goal is to make a clear decision with minimal back-and-forth. Use this simple decision flow:

1. What is it?
   • Does it look like a real site?
   • Does it mention your brand?
   • Does it resemble a login, checkout, or support page?
2. How risky is it?
   • High risk: credential collection, payment capture, customer support scams
   • Medium risk: suspicious branding, parked pages that could activate later
   • Low risk: clearly unrelated or legitimate third-party use
3. What should we do next?
   • Investigate (collect evidence, confirm ownership/hosting)
   • Escalate (trust & safety, security, legal)
   • Block (if your security team maintains blocklists)
   • Ignore (and optionally keep monitoring in case it changes)

Domain Miner can also alert you when a previously quiet domain changes in a meaningful way (for example, when web hosting or email gets added). That helps you focus on domains that are becoming operational.

5) Who this is for

Brand protection works best when it’s shared and repeatable. Different teams will use Domain Miner in slightly different ways, but the underlying workflow is the same: identify, monitor, review, and decide.

Brand & marketing teams

Brand and marketing teams often use Domain Miner to reduce customer confusion and protect launches. In practice, that looks like:

• Spot impersonation that could confuse customers
• Protect launches, promotions, and high-visibility campaigns
• Reduce time spent manually searching and screenshotting abuse

Legal & compliance

Legal and compliance teams typically need consistent documentation and prioritization. Domain Miner helps by making it easier to:

• Build a clearer record of abuse over time
• Prioritize the most harmful cases first
• Support enforcement workflows (registrar/host outreach, takedown processes)

Security & trust teams

Security and trust teams often focus on triage and escalation. Domain Miner supports that by helping you:

• Triage the highest-risk domains quickly
• Add suspicious domains to monitoring so you get notified when they activate
• Export indicators for operational workflows (when applicable)

6) Getting started

If you’re new to Domain Miner, start with one of the paths below. Each one is a valid entry point, and you can expand later.

• Brand Discovery ↗: identify what to protect and define the brand terms that matter most
• Domain Discovery ↗: find lookalike domains and understand what’s showing up right now
• Watchlists ↗: save and monitor continuously so you don’t have to “remember to check”

If you want a simple starting point: do one Domain Discovery ↗ run for your primary brand name, then save it as a Watchlist ↗. From there, you can refine based on what you see.