Can you bid on competitor brand terms?
Yes, you can bid on competitor brand terms in Google Ads. Google's policies explicitly allow advertisers to target competitor brand names as keywords, and this has been a standard practice in paid search for more than a decade. What you cannot do is use a competitor's trademarked name in your ad copy itself without authorization, because that is a trademark violation that competitors can report, and Google will disapprove the ad. The keyword targeting is fair game; the ad creative has to stay clear of the trademark.
What Google actually allows
Google's trademark policy draws a clean line between keyword targeting and ad text. You are permitted to bid on competitor brand keywords, trigger your ad when a user searches for a competitor's name, and pay for clicks from those searches. You are not permitted to include the competitor's trademarked name in the visible ad headline, description, or display URL unless you have authorization from the trademark holder, are a reseller or informational site, or meet one of Google's narrow exceptions. In practice, this means competitor conquest campaigns use competitor names in the keyword list but route the ad copy to focus on your own brand's differentiators.
Competitors can report trademark violations through Google's trademark complaint form, and Google typically removes the offending ad within days. This is why the tactical discipline matters. Sloppy ad copy on a conquest campaign gets reported, taken down, and occasionally escalates into a cease-and-desist if the competitor is aggressive about enforcement.
When competitor conquest is actually worth doing
The fact that you can bid on competitor terms does not mean you should. Competitor conquest campaigns work well in some specific situations and poorly in many others.
They tend to work when you have a genuine differentiation story the searcher would find relevant. If your product solves a real weakness in the competitor's offering, such as a pricing advantage, a missing feature, a meaningfully better support model. A conquest ad that speaks to that advantage can pull qualified clicks. They also work in categories where switching is common and considered, like SaaS tools, financial services, and business software. A CFO researching NetSuite alternatives is genuinely open to seeing competing options.
They tend not to work as well when the searcher has high intent to buy the specific competitor brand. Someone typing "Salesforce pricing" is usually deep in a Salesforce evaluation, not browsing alternatives, and your ad is competing against Salesforce's own ads in its own auction. CPCs are typically high because Google's quality score system penalizes you for low relevance on branded keywords, meaning you will pay more per click than the competitor pays on their own brand.
They also tend to provoke retaliation. Most established competitors will bid on your brand in response, and the resulting bidding war usually costs both sides more than either gains. This is one reason why competitor conquest campaigns should be a deliberate strategic choice rather than a default tactic.
The tactic works meaningfully better when paired with a dedicated comparison landing page. By this we mean a "[Your Product] vs [Competitor]" page that directly addresses the differences a prospect researching the competitor is trying to understand. This is a standard play in B2B SaaS for a reason. A generic homepage landing page converts poorly on competitor traffic because the searcher is evaluating a specific alternative, not browsing your category. A comparison page that actually compares, with feature tables, honest trade-offs, and specific use case differentiation, converts meaningfully higher because it answers the question the searcher is really asking. The comparison page also tends to rank organically for the same competitor comparison queries over time, which compounds the paid investment into a durable SEO asset.
What we actually do with competitor terms
In B2B Google Ads programs, our approach to competitor bidding is usually more targeted than blanket conquest. We tend to bid on competitor terms in two specific situations. First, when a competitor has a significant weakness that a well-written ad can credibly address, such as price point, a capability gap, a customer experience issue, and the click volume justifies the higher CPCs (in part due to the low quality score). Second, as a defensive measure when a competitor is already bidding on the client's brand, where matching their tactic is sometimes the only way to force them to retreat.
What we usually avoid is bidding on competitor terms without a clear strategic reason. The default move--adding competitor names to the keyword list because they seem like obvious targets--tends to produce low-quality clicks, inflated CPCs, and retaliation. Competitor bidding is a tactical tool with real value in specific situations, not a standard lever that should be pulled on every account.