Protecting Your Etsy Listings: Copy Hunter and the IP Policy Playbook

Two things get called “being copied”, and only one of them is an Etsy policy matter. A shop selling the same idea as you — the same kind of mug, the same phrase everyone in the niche uses — is competition. A shop using your photographs, your text, or something you hold a registered right in is infringement. Etsy's process only deals with the second.

Copy Hunter sits before that decision, not after it. It is a search, not a verdict, and this guide is mostly about keeping those apart — because the fastest way to get an infringement report rejected is to file one about the first thing.

Step 1: Scan one listing, on purpose

Copy Hunter asks you to choose one of your listings to scan, and then searches Etsy's live marketplace for listings whose titles overlap with it. It runs when you press the button and at no other time — there is no background watch, no nightly sweep, and nothing accumulates while you are away.

It also searches exactly one place: Etsy. The page says so plainly and names the platforms it does not watch — Amazon Handmade, Pinterest, Instagram, AliExpress, TikTok Shop. If you need those covered, this is not the tool, and it would rather tell you than imply otherwise.

What the scan actually measures: shared words between two titles, ignoring common stopwords and anything under three characters, scored as a percentage of their combined vocabulary. It is not a visual comparison, not an image match, and not an AI similarity model. Two listings can score high because the niche has a standard vocabulary — and frequently do.

Step 2: Read the score as a shortlist

Results start at 35% overlap and stop at the top five matches. The floor exists to cut noise rather than to mark a legal line, and the ceiling exists because a list of thirty near-identical craft titles is not a shortlist anyone reviews.

Each match highlights which words drove its score, so a 62% is not left unexplained. Read those words first. If they are the words every listing in the category uses, the score is describing the category, not a copy — and you have your answer without opening anything.

Two things are filtered out before you ever see them: the listing you scanned, which would match itself at nearly 100%, and every other listing belonging to your own shops. That second exclusion exists because relisting an expired item under a new id is ordinary Etsy practice, and without it a shop's own relist showed up as a perfect copy of itself.

Step 3: The part Atlas refuses to do

Open a real match and there are no enforcement buttons. Instead, one sentence: Atlas doesn't file reports or generate evidence for you yet. Alongside it, a link to open the listing on Etsy and decide for yourself.

That is deliberate, and it is the honest position. A percentage produced by comparing words is not evidence of copying, and a button labelled “File IP Report” next to one would suggest Atlas had established something it has not. The looking is yours to do.

If you saw Copy Hunter on the product tour first, this is the one place the two pages genuinely differ. The tour's sample cases carry a Take Action panel — Download Evidence Package, File Platform IP Report, Send Direct Message Template — because they illustrate a workflow. Those buttons do not appear on a match from a real scan, and that is not an oversight: they were shown on real findings once, did nothing when pressed, and were replaced with the sentence above.

So the scan's real output is a shortlist and a reason to look — which, for most sellers, is the part that was actually taking the time.

Step 4: Decide whether it is an IP matter at all

Once you have looked, the question stops being about overlap and becomes Etsy's. Its policy is specific about what it covers, and most rejected reports fail on the same handful of points — including one that catches people out badly: when the form asks for examples of your work, it wants your own listings, not the one you are reporting.

Our post on what Etsy's IP policy actually says walks through the policy, the common rejection causes, and what happens if a report lands on you instead — sourced from Etsy's own help articles. Read it before filing anything. Neither that post nor this guide is legal advice, and neither can tell you what your rights are in your situation.

Step 5: Keep the record

Every scan you run is kept, and the page reports three real figures across them: Scans Run, Matches Found, and Best Match Found. These are counts of what you did, not a threat level.

The history is more useful than it first looks. A listing you scan quarterly builds a record of when a match first appeared, and “first seen on this date” is a far better thing to have on hand than a memory of noticing something once.

What to actually do this week

1. Scan your single best-selling listing. Not all of them — the one with the most to lose is where this is worth your attention.
2. For each match, read the highlighted shared words before the percentage. Category vocabulary explains most high scores.
3. Open anything that still looks wrong on Etsy and compare the photographs and description, which is where actual copying shows up — not the title.
4. If it looks like a genuine policy matter, read the IP policy post and use Etsy's own reporting portal. Atlas does not file on your behalf.
5. Re-scan the same listing next quarter. The value is in the dated history, not in any one result.

For the module in full, see Using Copy Hunter.