Counterfeiting is one of retail’s most persistent and costly problems. Counterfeit and pirated goods accounted for an estimated $467 billion in global trade, according to the OECD, and is a problem that runs from manufacturing through shipping to customs. The marketplaces where shoppers encounter that reality are shifting their defenses. Brands selling online expect the large marketplaces to catch infringement on their behalf, and how well a platform does that is becoming a competitive advantage.
Temu is one of the youngest and fastest-growing online marketplaces in the world. It began operations four years ago and today spans roughly 700 product categories, with sellers from dozens of countries. Building meaningful oversight across a marketplace that large is a huge undertaking, and it is the one Temu’s newly released 2026 IP Protection Report sets out to document.
The marketplace has laid out a year of enforcement data to illustrate how it approaches intellectual property on the platform. The throughline is that prevention, detection and enforcement happen before infringing products are sold, rather than only after a takedown notice is filed. To do this, Temu’s own systems screen incoming listings against a continuously updated library of protected brand assets, using image recognition, logo detection and optical character recognition to flag potential infringements before they go live.
Here is how Temu says that works, and what the brands and industry bodies involved make of it.
Brands Supply the Reference Material Temu Screens Against
One layer of Temu’s approach to IP protection is its Brand Guardian Initiative. Through it, rights holders feed their trademarks, product images and other protected assets directly into Temu’s monitoring systems. The platform then screens incoming listings against that material and blocks infringing products before they go live.
Levi Strauss & Co. joined the Brand Guardian Initiative and said its collaboration with Temu’s Brand Protection Team was “both positive and highly valuable.” Representatives from Maersk, another member, described the approach of Temu’s IP team as “responsive, data-driven, and collaborative” and “instrumental” to strengthening IP protection for the company.
More than 3,000 brands, including roughly 500 small and mid-sized businesses that often lack the resources to police their rights, have joined the Brand Guardian Initiative directly.
Temu has also engaged more than 130 industry associations over the year, nearly double the prior period, according to its 2026 IP Protection Report. They include the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition, the International Trademark Association, Union des Fabricants and REACT, along with public authorities including the UK Intellectual Property Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization.
The International Trademark Association said it “recognizes Temu’s constructive and cooperative approach to addressing counterfeiting through active participation in industry-led initiatives.”
Enforcement Happens Before a Brand Has to Get Involved
For every listing Temu removes after a brand reports it, the company says it proactively finds and removes 331 on its own. This is 60 percent more than it reported the year before, and most enforcement now happens before a rights holder gets involved.
In fact, much of it begins before a seller even lists a single product. Prospective sellers are vetted against third-party data sources that confirm company registration details, legal representatives and operational status. More than 40 percent of applications fail those checks and are rejected, according to Temu. Those who do get on are still subject to IP guidelines that Temu enforces.
Temu has automated much of the screening that catches infringing products, using image and video recognition alongside text and semantic analysis. Its monitoring database now holds more than 47 million images and 9.5 million keywords, and new listings are checked against it before they go live. The protected assets of more than 15,000 brands now sit inside that system, up from roughly 5,000 a year earlier.
To Fight “Dupes,” Temu Leans on Image Detection, Not Just Trademark Matching
Not every knockoff carries a fake logo. Every marketplace is dealing with the rise of the “dupe”: a product that copies the look and feel of a well-known item without using its trademark at all. Keyword filters tend to miss them because they screen for brand names and protected terms.
Temu says it addresses dupes by putting more weight on image-based signals. Alongside logo detection and optical character recognition, the platform compares listings against a continuously updated library of protected brand assets and reference material supplied by rights holders. That lets it flag look-alike products even when a listing makes no reference to the brand it resembles. Temu says it trains its detection models continuously as infringement patterns change.
What rights holders get out of this
Speed is the other half of the takedown story. Temu says it resolves rights holder takedown notices in under 24 hours on average. Brands can submit and track those complaints through two dedicated portals, and the company recently expanded its Brand Registry Portal to cover geographical indications, the origin-based protections that apply to products like Champagne or Parmigiano Reggiano.
For One Licensed-Goods Maker, Vetting Replaced Years of Chasing Knockoffs
Pluginz is an Anaheim, California, company that makes officially licensed, guitar-inspired accessories for brands including Fender, Marshall and Gibson, and for artists such as Ozzy Osbourne and Oasis. Its founders, Mike Stricklin and Dan Jacobs, built the business on licensing deals, which meant they also inherited the licensing world’s oldest headache: counterfeits.
For years, protecting those designs meant chasing knockoffs across every channel the company sold on, filing takedowns and following up only to watch new copies appear. When Pluginz joined Temu’s U.S. Local Seller Program in 2025, the founders found the platform’s intellectual property vetting much stricter than what they had seen elsewhere. Every license and partnership had to be verified before a product could go live.
“It was incredible how tough Temu was on IP,” said Stricklin. “They were far and away the toughest marketplace and we’re still working to get our full product listing through their vetting and on the site. But we’re not complaining – it’s a breath of fresh air.”
The payoff, by the company’s account, was twofold. Pluginz sold more than 10,000 products on Temu within six months, making it the company’s fastest-growing sales channel. With Temu’s monitoring doing much of the policing, the founders have redirected the hours once spent hunting fakes into European expansion and new brand licenses.
Temu Tries to Stop Counterfeits at the Search Bar
The last layer of the strategy targets shoppers directly. Through a campaign it calls “Say No to Counterfeit,” Temu blocks searches for terms like “fake,” “dupe,” and “counterfeit” across its markets, returning no results and instead a message discouraging the purchase of knockoffs. In France, Temu added a link in October 2025 to an awareness campaign run by the anti-counterfeiting group Union des Fabricants.
Some of the consumer-facing work targets the categories where the stakes are highest. Counterfeit auto parts carry physical safety risks. Temu participates in Automotive Anti-Counterfeiting Council symposiums alongside automotive brands, manufacturers and safety organizations to shape its automotive-specific keyword monitoring and consumer education. Shoppers can also flag suspect listings through a “Report this item” function that alerts Temu’s review teams.
Where Marketplace IP Enforcement Goes From Here
No single marketplace can end counterfeiting on its own. It is a problem that spans manufacturers, platforms, shippers, and regulators, and the nearly half a trillion dollars that changes hands for fakes each year is a measure of how determined counterfeiters are.
The experience of newer marketplaces like Temu suggests that proactive detection and prevention are taking on more importance than after-the-fact takedowns. A successful IP protection program is marked less by how many fakes a platform takes down than by how many it keeps from being listed in the first place.
