How Jones Road Beauty Reclaimed Google's Front Page with Podqi

About Jones Road Beauty

Jones Road Beauty, founded by makeup legend Bobbi Brown in 2020, built its brand on a radical idea: skincare and makeup shouldn't be separate. Their hero product, the Miracle Balm, became a cult favorite for its "no-makeup makeup" look. But success bred a problem. Counterfeiters flooded marketplaces with fake balms and unauthorized sellers hijacked Google's front page, stealing customers and damaging the brand's reputation.

The Problem

Fake Jones Road websites were appearing at the top of Google's page through paid ads.

Customers searching for "Jones Road" clicked the first result without checking the domain, entered their credit card information, and never received their orders. These weren’t random scammers. They were sophisticated operations buying Google and Meta ads to shoot straight to the top of search results, then cloning Jones Road’s branding to look identical to the real site.

A look at the fake sites Podqi detected and removed:

During peak sales periods like Black Friday and Memorial Day, fake sites were even promising free shipping. Jones Road's customer service team was flooded with hundreds of tickets from confused customers asking why their orders were shipping from China.

And the fakes weren't just on Google. Unauthorized sellers listed Jones Road products across Amazon, eBay, and Walmart despite the brand having no official presence on those platforms. Counterfeit ads ran on Meta and Google, driving traffic to scam sites using stolen product photography.

Jones Road's previous brand protection provider couldn't keep up. Reports were Excel-based and arrived late (when they arrived at all). When the team flagged the fake website crisis, the provider focused exclusively on domains while neglecting marketplace enforcement. Response times averaged two weeks. By the time a fake site came down, more had popped up.

Our Approach

Jones Road switched to Podqi in October of 2025, looking for a platform that could move as fast as the counterfeiters.

Podqi's AI-native platform monitors 100+ marketplaces and detects fake domains, unauthorized ads, and counterfeit listings in real time. Instead of waiting for weekly Excel reports, Jones Road's Chief of Staff Bianca could see every pending enforcement in a live dashboard. 

For fake ads, Podqi leveraged direct relationships with Meta and Google to remove unauthorized ads immediately. For fake domains (Jones Road's biggest pain point), Podqi deployed a two-pronged approach: (1) direct takedown requests to hosting providers and (2) simultaneous SEO delisting to remove sites from Google search results. Leveraging our partnerships with hosting providers allowed these sites to be removed swiftly. And even when shady hosts refused to comply, the domains disappeared from search.

Podqi's automated rules handled the volume at scale. The platform continuously monitored for new infringements, scored risk levels, and tracked repeat offenders across platforms. Unauthorized Amazon listings were flagged for manual review when they appeared "official" due to brand registry quirks, then removed through direct platform relationships. Fake Shopify sites and domains triggered automatic enforcement workflows—giving Jones Road's team real-time visibility into every pending takedown instead of waiting for weekly Excel reports.

Impact

In six months, Podqi resolved 1,613 infringements for Jones Road, including:

• 318 fake Shopify domains taken down

• 246 total fake websites removed from the internet

• 276 unauthorized Amazon listings eliminated (despite Jones Road having no official Amazon presence)

• 178 eBay counterfeits removed

Response times dropped from two weeks to 3-4 days. Most takedowns happened within a week. For high-priority threats flagged by leadership, enforcement was often same-day.

Customer service complaints dropped significantly. The hundreds of tickets that used to flood in during sales periods slowed as fake sites ranking on Google's first page disappeared.

Enforcement scaled across 837 platforms. Podqi's automated detection and takedown system covered marketplaces globally without per-platform fees.

"Before, we didn't have visibility into what was happening," Bianca summarized. "Here, it's really easy to see all the pending enforcements, things that are done, things that need to improve. The speed is a lot faster, especially when the CEO sends me things directly and I can just forward it [to Podqi]. It's much easier that way because the volume is crazy. It's never ending, so we needed somebody with faster eyes on the problem."

Podqi turned brand protection from a reactive scramble into proactive defense, so when customers search for Jones Road, they find the real thing.