Can LLMs Reason About Brand Ownership? An Empirical Study of Domain Attribution Intelligence
When a new domain resembling a popular brand appears, defenders face a fundamental ambiguity: it may be an attacker-created squatting site for phishing, or it may be a domain the brand itself registered, either defensively, to block attackers, or legitimately, for a new product or service launch. Incorrectly flagging a brand-owned domain as malicious produces a false positive that harms end users and damages the brand's reputation. Resolving this ambiguity requires brand intelligence: the ability to determine, at scale, whether a given domain belongs to a brand. Large language models (LLMs), with their broad knowledge of brand domain relationships, offer a promising zero configuration approach to this problem, but their reliability for brand intelligence tasks remains unknown. We present the first systematic empirical evaluation of LLM brand intelligence across three tasks: domain enumeration (Q1), open ended brand attribution (Q2), and binary ownership classification (Q3). We evaluate four models, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Claude Sonnet 4.6, across four retrieval settings (in context, web search, WHOIS lookup, and combined) on 36 of the most phished brands. Our results reveal a stark dichotomy: models achieve up to 82% precision enumerating brand domains from memory alone, yet fail at ownership verification without external tools, with macro F1 at most 0.37 in ICL mode. WHOIS augmentation lifts Q3 macro F1 by up to 0.65 points, yielding near perfect precision (<= 0.99), dramatically reducing the false positive risk for defenders. We provide concrete recommendations for deploying LLMs in brand protection pipelines.