When A Brand Becomes More Popular Than The Meaning Of The Word In Google

There are some brands that have generic names that have become more popular than the actual meaning of the word. In those cases, Google Search may rank or show information about the brand over the meaning of the word.

Google may have done that for the term and brand name [pepper] – where now Google is showing a shopping box at the top of the result for the Pepper brand of women’s undergarments.

Here is a screenshot:

This came up on Twitter and John Mueller of Google explained, “Things like this can change over time, brands can become stronger than the original meaning of a word even.” “It feels a bit weird to me at first, but I don’t know the brand nor the product category, and it’s US-focused, so it’s hard to judge,” he added.

One thing SEOs often cringe at is when a company they work with uses a generic name for their brand name. Getting that brand name to rank above the generic meaning is super hard, and something SEOs cannot do alone without big marketing budgets and big TV and radio campaigns.

Here are the tweets related to this:

i googled pepper and instead of peppers i got bras wtf google? pic.twitter.com/5x0vZ4R64Y

— estefannie aka ‘a woman’ (@estefanniegg) September 28, 2022

Things like this can change over time, brands can become stronger than the original meaning of a word even. (It feels a bit weird to me at first, but I don’t know the brand nor the product category, and it’s US-focused, so it’s hard to judge)

— ????〈link href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical 〉???? (@JohnMu) September 29, 2022

In this example, the company’s website also outranks the Wikipedia entry for the term pepper. Now that is impressive.

Forum discussion at Twitter.