Trademark Name Checker is a free tool that screens a brand name against the live U.S. trademark register and returns a 0–100 conflict-risk score with the specific similar marks it found. It is preliminary screening, not legal advice.

What it does

You type a brand name (optionally with a goods or services class) and it compares that name against live U.S. trademarks on three axes:

Sound: phonetic similarity, so it catches sound-alike marks even when the spelling differs.
Spelling: orthographic similarity, including one- and two-character edits (typo-style look-alikes).
Meaning: semantic similarity, so names that convey the same idea can surface even when they neither sound nor look alike.

It combines those signals into a single 0–100 conflict-risk score and shows a per-signal breakdown (sounds / looks / means / goods class) for every match. Each match links to its underlying USPTO record so you can see the evidence, not just a number. It is free, instant, and needs no signup, card, or account.

How it works

The tool maintains a daily-refreshed copy of the live USPTO trademark register (roughly 4.6 million live marks) and runs the comparison against that snapshot. The current data date and engine version are shown on every result.

Matching

Phonetic: a sound-alike key plus edit distance identifies marks that are pronounced similarly.
Orthographic: character-level similarity and small edit distances identify look-alike spellings.
Semantic: text embeddings (vector similarity) identify marks with a related meaning.
Goods-class relatedness: when you enter a Nice class, related classes temper or raise the risk; when you don’t, goods overlap is left unassessed rather than assumed.

Scoring

The signals are weighted and normalized against how common your name pattern is, then gated by goods-class relatedness, to produce the 0–100 score. The number reflects the single closest match; the per-signal chips show what is driving it. It is not a stacked sum of the signals. See the full methodology for the exact weights, combiner, risk bands, and a versioned changelog.

What it can’t do

This is a preliminary screening tool, not a legal service. It does not, and cannot:

Give legal advice or a clearance opinion. It never tells you a name is “clear,” “available,” or safe to adopt, and it does not predict whether an application would be approved or refused.
See beyond registered word marks. It screens word marks in the USPTO register. It does not evaluate logos or design marks, trade dress, common-law (unregistered) rights, or state and foreign marks.
Judge real-world use. It compares names against a periodic data snapshot; it does not assess actual marketplace use or an examiner’s judgment.
File or register anything. It does not submit applications; it is the front-of-funnel screener, not the filing.

A high score means signals worth investigating, not a prediction of refusal. A low score means fewer close matches in this dataset, not that a name is unclaimed or clear to adopt. For an opinion on your specific situation, consult a licensed trademark attorney. Data is derived from USPTO public records; this tool is not affiliated with or endorsed by the USPTO.

Your privacy

The name you type is treated as a potentially confidential idea. To score it, your browser keeps it in the page address after the # and sends it to our own scoring service in the body of a request, not to anyone else. The part of an address after # is never transmitted to a server, so your name stays out of our request logs and out of the Referer header, and our analytics has no field that could carry it. It is held briefly in an in-memory cache (a few hours) to speed up repeat checks, is never written to a database, and is never sold or shared. The full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

Verify it yourself. Open your browser’s developer tools, then run a check and look at three things:

The address bar. Your name appears only after the # in the URL. Because browsers never transmit the part after # to a server, it stays out of request logs and out of the Referer header sent to other sites.
The Network tab. The only request that carries your name is the check call to this site, and it carries it in the POST body, never in a URL. Any request to another domain (a mark image, for example) shows only our domain in its Referer, never your name.
The analytics events. They report the score, the risk band, and match counts only. There is no field for your name, so there is nowhere for it to leak.

This is a property that a blended domain, social, and entity lookup structurally cannot match, because that approach has to hand your name to third parties. Here, only our own scoring service ever sees it.

Check a brand name now →

See also our Methodology, Terms, and Privacy Policy.