The Pseudo-Brand Index

By Josh Pigford · Published August 7, 2026 · Figures verified August 7, 2026

Amazon search results fill with brands nobody has heard of: SZHLUX, HORUSDY, names built to clear a trademark bar rather than to win customers. Knockoff traces those brands through USPTO records to the companies that own them. This page is the aggregate picture, published so anyone writing about the disposable-brand economy has numbers to cite.

Brand-attribution figures are from the Knockoff feed generation of August 3, 2026 and were verified August 7, 2026. Observation counters are live and cited as of August 2026. The page refreshes quarterly; every figure carries its date.

What a pseudo-brand is

A pseudo-brand is a legally registered trademark doing the minimum a brand can do: it exists so a seller can list generic goods behind a protected name. The names have a signature (all caps, five to nine characters, consonant runs no language would produce) because nobody meant them to be pronounced. They are not counterfeits. A counterfeit impersonates a real brand; a pseudo-brand plays by the rules Amazon wrote, which is what makes the problem durable. The full explainer, including the 2017 Brand Registry change that created the incentive, is in Why is Amazon full of brands like SZHLUX?

The index starts from 8,943 Amazon brands (as of August 3, 2026) that the Knockoff corpus can attribute to a single USPTO trademark owner with confidence. Treat that as an attribution floor, not a census of Amazon: brands whose ownership cannot be established cleanly are left out rather than guessed at.

One brand in three came through a filing mill

Of the 8,943 attributed brands, 3,029 (33.9%) were filed through mill attorneys (as of August 3, 2026). A mill attorney, in this index, is an attorney of record whose USPTO book runs to 10 or more marks with at least half owned by registrants in China or Hong Kong. Mill-filed means a brand’s trademark ran through such an attorney at least once.

That is a fact about the filing channel, not a verdict on the brand. Ordinary companies use high-volume attorneys too, which is exactly why this page publishes aggregates and names no brand and no attorney.

89.7% of China-owned brands are mill-filed

Of the 2,898 attributed brands owned from China, 2,600 (89.7%) were mill-filed. Of the 3,893 owned from the United States, 227 (5.8%) were. That gap is the headline of this page.

The gap does not say Chinese brands are junk. Established Chinese companies like Anker and DJI are real brands with reputations to lose, and Knockoff treats them that way. What it shows is an industrial filing pipeline: in one filing culture, mass-produced trademarks are the standard route onto Amazon, and in the other they are the exception.

Where the owners are

The United States is the largest owner country, with 3,893 of the 8,943 attributed brands (43.5%). China is second at 2,898 (32.4%). Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan follow far behind.

The operators behind the brands

Brands are the visible layer; operators run them. 1,833 of the attributed brands (20.5%) resolve to multi-brand operators, entities running more than one brand name at once. 1,536 (17.2%) belong to owners holding 50 or more distinct brands. As of August 3, 2026.

The storefront side tells the same story. Knockoff’s seller-identity data joins 284,118 Amazon seller profiles into 165,091 distinct operator entities; the largest single operator runs 22 storefronts. 65.2% of those seller profiles (185,325) are registered in China, against 14% in the United States. As of August 3, 2026.

The observation network

The raw material comes from shoppers. As of August 2026, an install base of over 100,000 browser extensions has observed 911,957 distinct Amazon sellers in the wild. 296,479 of those have a resolved business country, and 73,995 have been reported by a shopper directly. A seller’s location only publishes once two shoppers on two different networks independently report the same one.

Methodology

The corpus. Knockoff’s data platform ingests the USPTO’s bulk trademark records nightly: 14.0 million applications ingested in total, 4.46 million marks currently live, held by 2.09 million distinct owners. 24.6% of the owners of live marks are registered in China or Hong Kong. As of July 2026.

Attribution. An Amazon brand enters the index only when its name resolves to a single USPTO trademark owner through the registration record, the assignment history, and human-reviewed operator clustering. Ambiguous matches are excluded rather than guessed, so every headline count here is a floor.

Mill-filed. The brand’s trademark was filed by an attorney of record whose USPTO book runs to 10 or more marks, at least half owned by China or Hong Kong registrants. A filing-channel statistic, never a quality verdict.

Operator clusters. Brands are grouped into operators using USPTO assignment records, shared filing details, and seller-identity disclosures, with a human review step before a cluster counts.

Seller identity. Seller registration countries come from the business disclosures US marketplaces require of higher-volume sellers under the INFORM Consumers Act, joined to seller profiles observed by the extension.

Refresh. Quarterly. Figures update in place with their as-of dates; the URL stays put.

What these numbers do not claim

• They name nobody. Everything on this page is an aggregate. No brand, owner, seller, or attorney is identified here as mill-filed or cluster-flagged, and none should be inferred.
• Mill-filed is not a junk verdict. It records the filing channel. Legitimate companies also appear in mill attorneys’ books.
• Pseudo-brands are not counterfeits. They are legally registered trademarks on generic goods. Counterfeiting is a different problem.
• Owner country is not a quality signal. The dividing line is disposability, not geography.
• 8,943 is a floor. It counts only the brands whose ownership resolves cleanly, not every pseudo-brand on Amazon.

Cite this page

For journalists

Custom aggregate cuts (by filing year, owner country, and, as the corpus grows, product category) can be pulled on request, along with sourcing for any figure on this page. Write [email protected]; boilerplate, logos, and screenshots are on the press page.