A method and a system for providing recommendations based on branding are disclosed. In example embodiments, an index comprising predetermined brand relationships is maintained. Each predetermined brand relationship comprises a first brand, a second brand, and a recommendation score between the first brand and the second brand. A corpus containing a plurality of user queries is also maintained. A seed set of brands corresponding to a category in the index is expanded by accessing the corpus containing the plurality of user queries, evaluating user queries of the plurality of user queries that contain a disjunction of brand terms, and identifying a new brand to add to the seed set based on the evaluating.