How do you detect typosquatting?

Domains one character away from well-known brands in a portfolio or traffic report. Type-in traffic with brand-name intent landing on unrelated pages. Trademark complaints or domain-dispute (UDRP) filings. Redirect traffic whose top "referrers" are misspelt brand addresses.

How do you prevent typosquatting?

Screen domain portfolios against trademark lists before monetising. Refuse redirect traffic from look-alike brand domains. Brands can register obvious misspellings defensively and monitor new registrations. Advertisers can exclude parked domains and review partner placements (Placement exclusion).

Typosquatting: how it works, warning signs and defences

Typosquatting

Someone registers misspellings of popular web addresses and earns from the people who mistype.

The short answer, from The Arbitrage Desk fraud map

How it works

People make typing mistakes: a missing letter, a doubled one, ".cm" instead of ".com". A typosquatter registers those near-miss addresses in bulk. Visitors who slip arrive at a parked domain showing ads related to the site they wanted, or are redirected onwards for a fee.

The visitor is real and has strong intent, which made typo domains attractive to domain parking programmes for years. The problem is that the intent belonged to someone else's brand. Laws such as the US Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999 let trademark owners sue, and since Google wound down parked-domain ads in 2025 and 2026, typo traffic has increasingly been sold through redirect systems with weaker safeguards.

Who pays for it

The brand, whose customer is intercepted and who may then pay for an ad click to get them back. The user, who can now be sent to scams. Advertisers on the parked page, who pay for navigational slips.

Who does it, and why

Domain speculators operating at scale. A 2010 study found the ad accounts behind typo domains were highly concentrated among a few operators.

Warning signs

Domains one character away from well-known brands in a portfolio or traffic report.
Type-in traffic with brand-name intent landing on unrelated pages.
Trademark complaints or domain-dispute (UDRP) filings.
Redirect traffic whose top "referrers" are misspelt brand addresses.

Defences

Screen domain portfolios against trademark lists before monetising.
Refuse redirect traffic from look-alike brand domains.
Brands can register obvious misspellings defensively and monitor new registrations.
Advertisers can exclude parked domains and review partner placements (placement exclusion).

An example

Real research: Tyler Moore and Ben Edelman (2010) found at least 938,000 typo domains targeting the top 3,264 .com sites, with about 80% earning from pay-per-click ads; among those showing Google ads, 63% used one of just five advertising IDs. In 2025, Infoblox described one actor holding about 3,000 look-alike domains, including a misspelling of gmail.com.

Documented cases

Vulcan Golf v. Google (2007): Typosquatting lawsuit over ads on parked look-alike domains
Malicious "direct search" redirects on parked domains (2025): Zero-click parking abuse: visitors to parked and typo domains sold on to scams and malware
In re Google AdWords Litigation (parked domains and error pages) (2017): Advertiser class action over undisclosed ad placement on parked domains and error pages