If you’re an Amazon shopper, you’ve likely noticed fake brands flooding the website in recent years. A new extension made by developer Josh Pigford promises to hide the phony, cheaply made products and lets you shop like a normal person again. 

The extension, called Knockoff, is available for Firefox, Chrome and all Chromium-based web browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Opera and Brave. Since Pigford launched the extension on Tuesday, it’s gone viral, with tens of thousands of downloads. A few days before this week’s launch, Pigford posted on X, “Built a little chrome extension that lets you dim (or hide!) all the crap, mass-produced, fake brands on Amazon.” The post garnered 22,000 likes. 

It works pretty simply. Once installed, any products from fake brands, dropshippers or otherwise suspicious vendors are marked and grayed out, highlighting the more reputable brands you might actually know. There’s also an option to automatically hide the fake brands so you don’t even have to see them at all. 

In an interview with 404 Media, Pigford says that Knockoff is built on prior extensions that aim to do this, such as AmazonBrandFilter and Amazon Brand Detector. The extension, which runs locally, doesn’t require an account, doesn’t send data to any company servers and doesn’t cost anything. It’s also open source, and you can find the source code on GitHub. 

So, how well does Knockoff work?

Anything sounds good on paper, but the proof is in the pudding. I took Knockoff for a test drive to see how well it filtered the mass-produced junk. 

My trial wasn’t terribly 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 the knockoff brands without any additional tuning. 

The short answer is that it did quite well. While searching for vacuum cleaners, it left most of the listings intact since they were from known brands including Shark, Bissell and Dyson. Only a few listings were grayed out, mostly because no brand name was listed in the product description. 

Solar lights fared 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 capital letters), while keeping listings for 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 blocked Torras, a well-known case brand with in-store stock at Best Buy, which holds thousands of global patents for many of its products. It doesn’t get much more real than Torras, but the company’s products were flagged because its name is stylized in all caps, which the extension checks.

Knockoff listed some lesser-known but still legitimate earbuds brands such as Tozo and Linsoul as real companies, while it properly flagged phony hand tool brands including Wgge and Horusdy. Brands that aren’t recognized by the extension often appear highlighted, but on the product page, the extension flags them as suspected fakes or entirely unrecognized. 

It helps that Knockoff has a system for reporting brands that are incorrectly labeled as legitimate (or wrongly marked as fake). If the extension flags a product as fake when it’s legit, you can click the badge and “report as a real brand.” Likewise, if the extension flags a product as legit when it’s really fake, you can click the badge and “report as junk” when you click on a badge over a brand that the extension recognizes. You may have to turn on badges for good brands in the settings to do this. 

There are some minor flaws with this approach. An example is the tool brand Spec Ops, which is a real brand, but Knockoff lists it as unrecognized and only gives me the option to “report as junk.” According to the GitHub page, all reports are logged and handled manually, but it doesn’t specify whether reports are logged based on which version of the report button users click. 

Knockoff is a good start for filtering junk

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

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

At the same time, Knockoff shows you brands likely to 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. 

Still, it all depends on what you’re shopping for. If all you need is a pack of zip ties for light cable management or to attach a tomato plant to a garden trellis, the ones sold by dropshippers will work just fine and save you a couple of bucks. 

And while Knockoff certainly makes it easier to shop for quality items, the extension still needs some fine-tuning and human analysis. 

Avoid fake brands without the extension

An eagle-eyed shopper can spot a knock-off 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 commerce content at CNET, is to look for the brand outside of Amazon.com. “If it seems like a string of random characters and that brand name isn’t selling elsewhere, there’s a good chance the seller is not the manufacturer,” said Holly. 

Holly also says to pay closer attention to negative reviews, since brands very often only fake positive reviews. Negative reviews can be a better indicator of quality problems that may help explain why a product is cheaper than others in the same category. 

Similarly, you can also look for a brand’s product support. If the only way to report a problem is directly to Amazon, Holly says you’re most likely dealing with a dropshipper that doesn’t offer product support if something breaks. 

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