How to Look Up Trademarks: USPTO, TSDR, and State Registries

To look up a trademark, use the free federal database at tmsearch.uspto.gov, which covers every pending, registered, abandoned, and canceled U.S. trademark. A thorough lookup checks spelling variants, similar-sounding words, design elements, and the product categories your brand would compete in, then extends beyond the federal system to state registries and the open web, because unregistered marks built through real-world use can still block your name.

What to Have Ready Before You Search

Start with the exact word, phrase, or slogan you want to use. Write down alternate spellings, phonetic variants, and any visual elements you plan to add. Searching only the exact name misses the marks most likely to cause trouble: the ones that sound or look similar without being identical.

Then figure out what categories of goods or services your business falls into. Trademarks are registered by category under the Nice Classification system, which sorts all goods into Classes 1 through 34 and all services into Classes 35 through 45.¹ Class 9 covers downloadable software and electronic devices; Class 35 covers advertising and business management services. A coffee shop selling branded mugs might need to search Class 43 (food services) and Class 21 (household utensils). Knowing your classes up front keeps you from wading through thousands of unrelated hits.

Don’t stop at your primary class. The USPTO groups related classes into “coordinated classes” because consumers often expect a company in one category to also sell in a related one. A clothing brand can face conflicts from marks registered for jewelry or leather goods. Searching coordinated classes catches those cross-category problems a single-class search would miss.²

Running a Wordmark Search on the USPTO Site

The USPTO’s cloud-based tool offers two modes.³ Basic mode gives you dropdown searches for wordmarks, goods and services, owners, and serial or registration numbers. Expert mode adds filters for design codes, coordinated classes, international classes, and the ability to tag and export results.⁴

Pick “Wordmark” from the dropdown and type the name in lowercase. One quirk to know: if you enter multiple words, the system treats each one as a separate search term and returns results containing any of them, not the exact phrase.⁴ Searching “golden harvest” returns every mark containing “golden” and every mark containing “harvest.” That broad net is useful at this stage.

On the results page, use the checkboxes on the left to filter for live or dead marks. Live marks are active registrations or pending applications. Dead marks have been abandoned or canceled. Focus on live marks first, but don’t dismiss dead ones outright.

Field Tags and Boolean Operators

For tighter searches, switch to “Field tag and Search builder.” Field tags go at the front of your search in all caps followed by a colon, with the term in lowercase. The most useful tags are CM: (combined mark, which searches word mark, translations, and pseudo marks), IC: (international class), DC: (design code), GS: (goods and services descriptions), and OW: (owner name).⁵

Boolean operators must be typed in uppercase. AND narrows results to entries matching all terms, OR (or just a space) broadens to any term, and AND NOT excludes specific terms. Parentheses control the order of operations. CM:golden AND IC:030 returns marks containing “golden” registered in Class 30 (staple foods). Wildcards work too: ? stands in for exactly one character, and * stands in for any number of characters, so CM:gold* catches “golden,” “goldleaf,” and “goldsmith.”⁵

Catching Marks That Sound Alike

This is where most do-it-yourself searches fall short. Two marks don’t need identical spelling to conflict; they just need to sound alike or create a similar impression. The examiner reviewing your application will consider whether your mark is confusingly similar in appearance, sound, or meaning to an existing registration.⁶ “Kool Katz” and “Cool Cats” look different on paper but sound nearly identical, and that alone can block a registration.

The search system supports phonetic searching using regular expression syntax. Put forward slashes before and after the search string and use brackets for interchangeable letters. For vowels, the pattern [aeiouy]{1,2} catches common vowel combinations. For consonants that sound alike, substitute groups: [ckqx]{1,2} for hard “k” sounds, [scz]{1,2} for “s” sounds, [fph]{1,2} for “f” sounds. Adding AND LD:true limits results to live marks. The technique takes practice, but it’s how the near-matches that exact-text searches miss come to light.

Looking Up a Logo

The system can’t do reverse image search. It uses a numerical coding system instead. Every design element in a registered logo gets a six-digit design search code organized by category, division, and section. The first two digits represent a broad category like “animals” or “celestial bodies,” and the remaining digits narrow it to a specific element.⁷

Look up the relevant codes in the Trademark Design Search Code Manual at tmdesigncodes.uspto.gov.⁸ If your logo shows a mountain, find the mountain code and search with the DC: field tag. You can combine a design code with a word search or class filter: DC:260117 AND IC:025 finds logos containing that specific mountain design element registered in Class 25 (clothing). In Expert mode, the “Design code” dropdown does the same thing without your having to type field tags.⁴

Reading a Hit: What the Record Actually Tells You

Finding a mark in the database is not automatically a deal-breaker, and finding nothing is not an all-clear. What matters is how similar the existing mark is to yours and whether the goods or services overlap enough to confuse consumers. Examiners weigh the similarity of the marks in appearance, sound, and meaning; how related the goods or services are; and whether the products move through the same marketing channels.⁶

Pulling the Full Record in TSDR

When you find a mark that looks like a possible conflict, open its full record in the Trademark Status and Document Retrieval system at tsdr.uspto.gov. Enter the serial or registration number to see the mark’s full history, current status, and associated documents.⁹

Status shows as live or dead. A live mark is an active registration or pending application, and that is the one to worry about. A dead mark is no longer active because the applicant abandoned it during prosecution or because the owner failed to file required maintenance documents and the registration was canceled.⁹ A dead federal registration does not guarantee the name is free. The former owner, or someone else, may still be using the mark in commerce and holding common law rights. Check why the mark died before treating it as available.

Disclaimers

Many registered marks include disclaimed words or design elements. A disclaimer means the owner does not claim exclusive rights to that part of the mark when used separately, only to the mark as a whole. Disclaimers are required for generic terms, merely descriptive words (like “creamy” for a yogurt brand), geographic terms, and informational elements like establishment dates.¹⁰ If the distinctive part of a conflicting mark is actually disclaimed, the conflict may be weaker than it first looks. The DS: field tag lets you pull disclaimer text during searches.

Specimens

The TSDR record also holds the specimen of use, the real-world evidence showing how the mark is actually used in commerce. For physical products, specimens include labels, tags, or packaging displaying the mark. For services, specimens are usually advertisements, website printouts, or business signage.¹¹ Seeing the specimen tells you how a competing mark actually appears in the marketplace, which helps you judge whether consumers would confuse it with yours. A listing that looks threatening in the database sometimes turns out to be used in a completely different context.

Keep a Record of What You Did

Save everything. Download TSDR records as PDFs, export your search results, and keep a log of every query and the date you ran it. That documentation is evidence you conducted a good-faith clearance search before adopting your mark. If a dispute comes up later, showing you searched diligently and found no conflict can help demonstrate you didn’t willfully infringe, which affects the damages a court can award.

What the Federal Database Won’t Show You

A clean federal result does not mean the name is safe. Trademark rights in the United States come from actual use in commerce, not from registration. A business that has used a brand name in its local market for years has enforceable rights even without a federal filing. Federal law protects unregistered marks against anyone whose use is likely to cause consumer confusion about the source of goods or services.¹² These “common law” marks will not appear in any government database, and overlooking them is one of the more expensive mistakes a new business can make.

State Registries

Each state runs its own trademark registry, usually through the Secretary of State’s office. These databases cover businesses that registered only at the state level. There is no single portal covering all 50 states, so each one must be searched individually. State registration fees typically run between $10 and $70, and the databases are generally searchable online for free. If your business will operate regionally, checking the relevant state databases is worth the time.

Common Law (Open Web) Searches

Finding unregistered marks means searching the open internet. Run your proposed name through major search engines, check business listing platforms, search social media profiles, and look at domain registrations. A full clearance search covers the USPTO federal database, state registries, and these common law sources.¹³ Even a small business using an unregistered name in a limited area can block your federal registration or force you to rebrand in its territory.

International

If your business has any international plans, check the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Brand Database. It gives access to international trademarks filed under the Madrid System, appellations of origin, and records from participating national trademark offices. You can search by keyword, owner name, registration number, goods and services descriptions, or image similarity.¹⁴

When to Bring in an Attorney

The USPTO recommends hiring a U.S.-licensed trademark attorney to run a comprehensive clearance search before filing. An attorney’s search reaches beyond the federal database into state registries and common law sources, and it comes with a legal opinion on whether your mark is likely to face problems.¹³ A confusingly similar existing mark can block your registration outright.¹⁵

Professional comprehensive searches typically cost several hundred to a few thousand dollars depending on the mark and the number of classes involved. The USPTO filing fee is $350 per class of goods or services,¹⁶ and a refused application means losing that fee on top of the time. A do-it-yourself search is a reasonable first step. If the results leave you uncertain, a professional opinion before filing is usually cheaper than guessing wrong.

1
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Nice Agreement Current Edition Version – General Remarks, Class Headings and Explanatory Notes
2
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Using Coordinated Classes in Your Federal Trademark Search
3
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Introducing the USPTOs New Cloud-Based Trademark Search System
4
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Federal Trademark Searching: Getting Started
5
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Federal Trademark Searching: Field Tag Searching
6
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Likelihood of Confusion
7
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Design Search Codes
8
World Intellectual Property Organization is not the source here—see USPTO manual.
9
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Checking the Status of a Trademark Application or Registration
10
United States Patent and Trademark Office. How to Satisfy a Disclaimer Requirement
11
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Specimens
12
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 15 – 1125 False Designations of Origin, False Descriptions, and Dilution Forbidden
13
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Hiring a U.S.-Licensed Attorney
14
World Intellectual Property Organization. Global Brand Database
15
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Possible Grounds for Refusal of a Mark
16
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Summary of 2025 Trademark Fee Changes