Are you tired of all the fake Amazon brands? Try this free browser extension – CNET

Amazon’s search engine has been flooded with counterfeit brands with gibberish names in recent years. To make your shopping experience a little less fake, developer Josh Pigford created Knockoff, a free extension that will clean up your feed by automatically hiding or dimming the listings of all those sketchy mass-produced brands.

Knockoff is available for Firefox, Chrome, and all Chromium-based web browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Brave. It is also available as a Safari extension.

Pigford launched the tool earlier this month, and it has since gone viral, with tens of thousands of downloads. A few days before the launch, Pigford posted to » The post garnered 22,000 likes.

Knockoff is now online!

Filter counterfeit brands on Amazon.

Sorry for brands like WNPETHOME, EHEYCIGA, YXYL, LU&MN, JOYIN, TOMY, GODONLIF, YOOJEE, LINGTENG, LANEIGE, VISCOO, BIODANCE, COOFANDY, BALENNZ, TOSY and LUENX.https://t.co/9mLk0EAsfG https://t.co/K07lMkepOW

— Josh Pigford (@Shpigford) July 7, 2026

It works quite simply. Once installed, any products from fake brands, dropshippers, or suspicious suppliers are marked and grayed out, highlighting the most reputable brands you may be familiar with. There is also an option to automatically hide fake marks so you don’t even need to see them at all.

In an interview with 404 Media, Pigford says Knockoff builds on previous extensions aimed at achieving this goal, such as AmazonBrandFilter and Amazon Brand Detector. The extension, which runs locally, does not require an account, does not send data to the company’s servers and costs nothing. It is also open source (as of version 0.7.2) and you can find the source code on GitHub.

So how well does Knockoff work?

Everything looks good on paper, but the proof is in the pudding. I took Knockoff for a test drive to see how well it filtered out mass-produced trash.

My trial was not very complicated. I searched for a variety of products across several categories using Knockoff’s stock settings to see how well the extension would filter out counterfeit brands without any additional settings.

The short answer is that it went pretty well. When searching for vacuum cleaners, most ads were left untouched since they were from well-known brands including Shark, Bissell, and Dyson. Only a few listings were grayed out, mainly because no brand name was listed in the product description.

Solar lights have been much worse. Knockoff actively blocked dozens of listings for lack of brand names and also blocked listings from Jkimk, Technet, Tonulax, and other unrecognized brands (most of which are stylized in all caps), while retaining listings from established brands, such as Brightown, a real company based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Phone cases are where things start to get trickier. The extension blocked brands such as Supfine, Dumkery, Hiearcool and several others. However, it also initially blocked Torras, a well-known case brand with in-store inventory at Best Buy, which holds thousands of worldwide patents for many of its products. It doesn’t get much more real than Torras, but the company’s products have been flagged because its name is stylized in all caps, which the extension checks for. Torras was added as a trustmark in later updates.

Knockoff listed some lesser-known but still legitimate headphone brands, such as Tozo and Linsoul, as real companies, while correctly flagging fake hand tool brands, including Wgge and Horusdy. Brands that are not recognized by the extension often appear highlighted, but on the product page, the extension flags them as suspected counterfeits or as completely unknown.

It helps that Knockoff has a system to flag brands that are incorrectly labeled as legitimate (or incorrectly marked as fake). If the extension flags a product as fake even though it’s legitimate, you can click on the badge and “report as real brand.” Likewise, if the extension flags a product as legitimate when it really is fake, you can click on the badge and “report it as spam” when you click on a badge above a brand recognized by the extension. To do this, you may need to enable badges from the right brands in Settings.

Since Knockoff’s launch, Pigford has released an update that responds to user responses, including a method to send feedback directly if you want to report a brand. The latest versions require a few additional permissions, but they are mainly used to enable new features.

Knockoff is a good start for filtering waste

Overall, Knockoff is a useful extension in a digital market dominated by AI-generated assets and unverified third-party products.

When shopping, the biggest benefit is to avoid low-quality off-brand brands. Even if you’re not actively buying anything, it’s fun (and terrifying) to see how many grayed-out product listings you can find in a given product category. We recommend enabling badges for well-known brands, but otherwise stock settings worked best.

At the same time, Knockoff shows you which brands might be fake on Amazon, but it doesn’t tell you which products are actually good or bad. Fake brands often come with fake or bot-written reviews more often than legitimate brands.

However, it all depends on what you buy. If all you need is a pack of ties for lightweight cable management or tying a tomato plant to a garden trellis, the ones sold by dropshippers will work great and save you a few dollars.

And while Knockoff certainly makes it easier to purchase quality items, the extension still requires some human tweaking and analysis. Updates to the extension appear to do just that, so if you’re just new to the tool, it’s likely that the extension has gotten even better over time.

Avoid fake brands without the extension

An eagle-eyed shopper can spot a counterfeit brand from a mile away if they know where and how to look at product listings.

The first step, according to Russell Holly, director of business content at CNET, is to research the brand outside of Amazon.com. “If it looks like a random string of characters and the brand name doesn’t sell anywhere else, there’s a good chance the seller isn’t the manufacturer,” Holly said.

Holly also advises paying closer attention to negative reviews, as brands often only fake positive reviews. Negative reviews can be a better indicator of quality issues and help explain why a product is cheaper than others in the same category.

Likewise, you can also search for product support of a brand. If the only way to report a problem is directly to Amazon, Holly says you’re probably dealing with a dropshipper that doesn’t offer product support in the event of an outage.

Another way to spot a fake brand is to find the same product sold under multiple brands. One example is a Broserengy alarm clock, Bluetooth speaker and phone charger combo. It’s almost identical to this product from Fansbe, including the RGB lights on the bottom, button placement (and labeling), and auxiliary USB port on the back for charging an accessory. These are two subtly different versions of the same product.