Glossary
Brand-abuse & phishing terms
Plain-language definitions of the terms used across this site and in our notices — so a reviewer, a brand owner or an AI assistant reads them the same way we do.
- Brand impersonation
- A site, app or account that poses as a brand it is not affiliated with, in order to capture that brand's search traffic, users or trust — usually as a step toward fraud. See the defender's guide.
- Canonical laundering
- Setting an abusive page's
rel="canonical"to an unrelated, reputable third-party site to borrow that site's search authority and disguise the impersonation from automated review. - Cloaking syn. content cloaking
- Serving search-engine crawlers different content from what human visitors see, to manipulate rankings while passing manual review. Read cloaking, explained.
- Credential harvesting
- Collecting usernames, passwords and one-time codes through a fake login page, for account takeover or resale.
- Interstitial
- A warning page a browser, CDN or search engine shows before a flagged site, giving the user a chance to turn back.
- Origin IP
- The real server address behind a CDN. Disclosing it (via the CDN's abuse process) lets the hosting provider act on the content at its source.
- RDAP Registration Data Access Protocol
- The structured, JSON successor to WHOIS for looking up a domain's registrar, status and abuse contact.
- Registrar
- The company through which a domain is registered. The registrar can suspend a domain for abuse and is a primary takedown channel.
- Safe Browsing
- A blocklist of dangerous URLs that browsers consume to warn users before loading a phishing or malware page.
- Typosquatting
- Registering misspelled, hyphenated or otherwise altered versions of a brand's domain to intercept users who mistype the name or trust the look-alike.
Spotted one of these against your brand?
Send us the URL — we'll document it and route it to everyone who can act.