Some names are dangerous to say out loud. In fantasy stories, saying the wrong one summons a dark lord. On the internet, saying it in all the right places summons a trademark lawyer.
That’s roughly what happened to Tell A Bot, a service that sells temporary phone numbers for SMS verification.
The Plan
If you’ve ever signed up for an app, you know the drill: enter your phone number, wait for a code, type it in. Services like Tell A Bot sell short-term numbers for exactly that step, which is handy for people who’d rather not hand their personal number to every platform they try.
The marketing plan was the most normal thing in the world. People search for things like “temporary number for [app name],” so the company built a landing page for each popular service. One page, one app, one search.
One of those pages was about a very popular dating app. And the team didn’t just mention it. They went full SEO. The app’s name was in the web address, the page title, the main headline and all through the text.
Google loved it. Unfortunately, Google wasn’t the only one reading.
The Summoning
One day, an email arrived through Cloudflare. It was a formal trademark infringement complaint from an agency working for the dating app’s owner, complete with the trademark’s registration number, the trademark office, the offending URL and a request for immediate removal.
Here’s the twist. The page wasn’t pretending to be the dating app. It didn’t use the logo, didn’t claim any partnership and didn’t sell access to the app. It sold phone numbers and explained that they could receive a verification code from that platform.
As the company later put it on its blog, the complaint wasn’t about impersonation. It was about a word.
Think of it this way: imagine running a game store and getting a complaint because you made a page called “Controllers for [console brand].” The brand is exactly what the customer is searching for. That’s the whole point of the page.
Choose Your Ending
The company had two options: fight a trademark complaint over a single landing page, or delete it and move on. It chose the second.
In the US, mentioning a brand to describe compatibility is often defended as nominative fair use. But small sites rarely get to make that argument before a complaint lands, and a legal fight over one page wasn’t worth it.
Then the company went further. It replaced service-specific pages with broad categories like “dating platforms” and “email providers,” and added a site-wide disclaimer saying it isn’t affiliated with any of the brands it mentions.
Legally, it was the safe move. For traffic, it was a disaster. The specific pages had been doing their job, and the generic ones did it far worse. Search visitors dropped sharply.
It’s the classic video game tradeoff: you survive the boss fight, but you lose most of your XP.
The Mystery
What still bugs the team is that everybody does this. Online stores build pages around product names all the time. Competitors in the same niche still run hundreds of pages built around individual app names, apparently without getting any emails.
So why this one? Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe the page ranked well enough to get noticed. Or maybe, the company half-jokingly wonders, a competitor pressed the report button. It admits it has zero evidence for that last theory.
Achievement Unlocked
The funniest part is that the SEO worked perfectly. The team spent real effort making sure Google understood exactly what the page was about. Google understood. So did the trademark owner. So did Cloudflare.
The real lesson isn’t that brands protect their names. It’s how easy it is to drift across the line one optimized page at a time. You build a page for one app, then another, then another, and suddenly you’ve built what the company calls a very efficient trademark-detection machine.
The full story, including the team’s slightly bitter SEO checklist, is on the Get SMS Online blog.
