You have a name, you are about to spend money on it, and somebody told you to get it checked. Before you read a single search result, understand what the two possible outcomes are actually worth. A hit is evidence — that thing is there and you can look at it. A blank result is not evidence; it is the absence of a hit, and absence of a hit has several possible causes of which “nothing is there” is only one. Which means a search can hand you a reason to stop and can never hand you permission to proceed. A clear search is not a clearance, and anybody writing the word CLEAR on a report is asserting something the method cannot establish. From that follows the commonest failure. A search is exactly as wide as the string somebody typed, and most of the risk sits in forms of the name nobody typed — how it sounds, how a stranger spells it, the same word in another script, joined, split, plural, as a picture. One mark is really dozens of queries, and the skill is in generating the variants rather than in reading the results. Two more things nobody mentions. Rights exist outside any register — a business trading under your name without ever registering it appears in no search box at all, so the register is one of two places to look and only one has a search field. And a register is a queue, not a photograph: something filed very recently may be invisible to you and still ahead of you by date, which is why every query we run carries its own date and time. Last, the answer founders like least. The best outcome of a search is that you change the name — this being the one week in a brand’s life when that costs nothing at all. Where we stop: we run the queries and record them. We do not opine on availability, registrability or similarity, we choose no categories, and we write no conclusion.
What this guide covers
Begin with the logic rather than the procedure, because everything people get wrong here follows from one step they never examine.
A search has two possible outcomes. Something comes up, or nothing comes up. Those look like opposite answers to the same question, and they are not answers of the same kind at all.
This is not a pedantic distinction and it is not ours. It is the same asymmetry that runs through any search of any index: finding a thing proves the thing, while not finding it proves only that your method did not reach it. Everybody accepts that when the subject is a lost file in an office. It becomes oddly hard to accept when the subject is a name somebody has already fallen in love with.
Set them side by side and the asymmetry is obvious once seen.
| The outcome | What it establishes |
|---|---|
| Something came up | That thing exists. You can look at it, read its date, see its image. |
| Nothing came up | That this query produced no result. Nothing more. |
The first is evidence. The second is the absence of evidence, which is a different thing wearing the same clothes.
And the reason the second row cannot be upgraded is that a blank has more than one possible cause.
Only the first of those four means what people take a blank to mean. No amount of diligence in running the search collapses the other three, because they are properties of the system rather than of the searcher.
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The third of those causes is the one nobody anticipates, and it is worth parking somewhere in your head, since a later section turns on it. Filing something and that something becoming visible to a stranger searching are two separate events separated by an interval. During that interval the thing exists, has a date, and is invisible — and no search run during the interval can see it however carefully it is run.
So one question, put to every search result you are ever handed, including ours.
Does this tell me the way is clear, or does it tell me that what was asked for was not found?
It is always the second. There is no search, however thorough, however expensive, that converts into the first.
It is worth noticing that this makes a search unusual among the things a business buys. Most checks you pay for are meant to produce a yes: the accounts balance, the machine passes, the papers are in order. This one is built only to produce a no, and the service is honest exactly to the extent that it says so. Anything that promises the yes is promising the one output the method cannot produce.
Which changes how a result should be used, not merely how it should be described.
A result is useful as a stop sign and useless as a green light. Treat a hit as a reason to take advice. Treat a blank as nothing at all — not encouragement, not permission, not comfort. Nothing.
From which one practical warning follows, and it is the most immediately useful line on this page.
If somebody hands you a report with the word CLEAR or AVAILABLE on it, that word is telling you about the report rather than about the mark. A search cannot establish either, so a document asserting one is asserting something its own method does not support.
We are not suggesting dishonesty. A great many such reports are produced in perfectly good faith by people who have never set the two outcomes beside each other and noticed that they are different kinds of thing. The word is a habit rather than a lie — and it is still a word to distrust.
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Which also explains why two searches of the same name, both competently run on the same day by two different people, can return completely different pictures. Nothing about the register changed between them. The strings changed, and the strings are the search. Two reports disagreeing is not evidence that one was careless; it is usually evidence that one asked more questions than the other.
Now the failure that produces most of the damage, and it is not a failure of effort.
A search returns results for what was asked of it. Nothing else. The breadth of a search is set entirely by the strings somebody typed into it, and that is a decision taken before any searching happens.
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And the ordinary version of this is somebody typing the name, once, exactly as they spell it.
That is one question. It will find a mark spelled identically and it will miss almost everything else. Most of the risk in a brand name lives in forms of it that the owner would never think to type, because the owner knows how to spell their own name.
And it is the owner who is worst placed to catch it, which is the cruel part. You have written your name a thousand times. Your fingers know it. The forms of it that a stranger would produce — hearing it once, writing it down in a hurry, guessing at a spelling — are precisely the forms your own hands will never type. The person searching their own name is the person least able to search it widely.
Which is how a perfectly genuine search produces a dangerously wrong impression.
Nothing came up, so the founder relaxes. The search was real, the search box was the right one, the result was honestly reported. The narrowness was upstream of all that, in a decision nobody experienced as a decision.
A one-page report is usually a sign of a one-question search. If you cannot see the list of queries that were run, you do not know how wide the search was — and the width is the only thing that mattered.
So here is what a name actually has to be turned into before anything is searched at all.
For an ordinary word mark we normally end up running a few dozen distinct queries. We will not dress that number up as a standard — it depends entirely on the word. A coined name with no relatives produces a short list. A common word in a crowded trade produces a long one.
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A rough way to build that list without any expertise: say the name out loud to four people who have never seen it written, ask each of them to write it down, and search whatever they produce. It is crude and it is genuinely effective, because it manufactures exactly the mis-hearings a stranger would make. We do a more systematic version of the same thing, and the principle is identical.
The first and most productive category, and the one a founder is least equipped to generate about their own name.
How does it sound when somebody hears it on a phone, in a shop, over a counter, in a language other than the one you had in mind? Every plausible spelling of that sound is a separate query, and the ones that turn things up are rarely the ones you would have guessed.
Second, and in this country it is not an edge case.
A name existing in one script may exist in another, filed by somebody who never wrote it in the alphabet you use. A search conducted in one script is a search of one script, and a business with a board in Devanagari is no less of an obstacle for it. Where the material you are handed is in another language, a translation is sometimes what makes it searchable at all.
Transliteration is also not a single operation, which compounds it. One Hindi word can be written in the Roman alphabet several defensible ways, and the person who filed before you picked one of them without consulting you. Searching only your preferred romanisation is, again, searching one question — and the other spellings are not obscure, they are just somebody else’s habit.
Third, and it is mechanical and constantly overlooked.
Two words run together. The same two words with a space. The same two with a hyphen. One word broken where nobody expects. Each of those is a separate string and a separate query, and search boxes do not quietly treat them as the same thing.
Fourth, the family around the word.
The plural. The possessive form somebody else might register. The name with a trade word attached in front or behind. The name with a letter dropped or doubled. None of these is clever; all of them are routinely skipped.
Trade words attached to the name deserve a mention of their own because founders treat them as neutral decoration. The word that describes your industry, the word that means premium, the geographical word, the family surname: each of them combines with your name to make a string somebody may already have filed, and each combination is its own query rather than a variation on the first.
Fifth, and since no keyboard reaches it, this is the category that gets skipped altogether more than any other.
Where the mark is a device — a logo, a symbol, a shape — the obstacle may be a picture with no word in it. Typing cannot reach an image at all. The search for those is a different exercise, and the design registration guide explains why appearance is its own kind of right with its own kind of register.
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Which inverts where founders imagine the expertise in this work sits.
Reading results takes minutes and needs very little. Deciding what to look for is the entire job, it happens before a single query is run, and it is invisible in the finished report unless the report lists the queries.
Judge a search by the list of what was looked for, not by the length of what was found.
And a fair word about software, because the obvious objection is that a machine should do this.
Tools handle the mechanical variations well — letters dropped, doubled, transposed. What they handle poorly is how a name is actually heard and mis-heard by people in a particular language, in a particular trade, in a particular part of the country. Those variants come from somebody who knows the trade, and they are disproportionately the ones that turn something up.
Now the half of this subject that has no search box at all, and founders almost never consider it because the obvious tool does not point at it.
Everything above concerns a register. A register holds what was filed. It does not hold what was merely done.
The asymmetry deserves saying out loud, because the paperwork implies precisely the reverse. A register is the easy half: it has a search box, the entries are structured, and the whole thing can be queried in an afternoon. The unregistered half has no box, no structure and no completeness, and in our experience it is where a real proportion of the trouble actually lives.
And an enormous number of businesses have been trading under a name for years without ever registering it.
A sweet shop with the name on its board since 1994. A workshop known by it across three districts. A small brand with ten thousand customers and no paperwork. Whether any of them is an obstacle to you is a legal question we will not answer — what is not in doubt is that they exist and that no register knows about them.
So the structural point, stated plainly.
An obstacle can live in either of two places. Only one of them has a search field in it.
A search of the register is a complete search of the register. Of the world it is a partial search, and no improvement to the register query narrows that difference by a single step.
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None of which is a criticism of registers. A register does exactly what it was built to do, which is to record what was filed with it, and it does that reliably. The mistake is entirely on the reading side — treating a complete answer to a narrow question as a partial answer to a wide one. The register is not overstating itself; the people quoting it are.
Which produces the free half of this whole exercise, and we would rather tell you to do it yourself than sell it to you.
Businesses show themselves. A business trading under a name is, almost by definition, visible somewhere — and looking where it would be visible costs nothing and takes an evening.
There is a sixth place that is specific to how business is actually done here, and it is the least systematic of all of them: ask somebody in the trade. A distributor, a supplier, somebody who has been selling into that market for fifteen years. “Have you ever come across this name?” is one question, costs one phone call, and reaches a kind of knowledge that exists in no database anywhere.
Tonight, before you pay anybody anything, including us.
If a business with your intended name is sitting on the first page of a search engine, you did not need a professional to discover that. Founders who skip this step and pay for a register search have bought the harder half and skipped the easier one.
One honest caution about doing the free half yourself: be systematic about writing down what you did not find as well as what you did. An evening of searching that produced nothing is worth something only if you can say afterwards exactly what you typed. Otherwise you are left with a feeling that you checked, which is the least useful possible outcome of having checked.
Two of those deserve a line more, because they are the ones people treat as unrelated to this question.
A company name and a brand name are different things with different registers behind them, and a name may be taken in one sense and apparently free in the other. Neither answers for the other, which is worth knowing before you register a company on the strength of a brand search or the reverse.
Domains are a weaker signal and a cheap one. A taken domain proves somebody wanted the word. An available one proves nothing at all about whether the name is free to use.
One further caution about the free half: do not stop at the first page of results. The business that matters is frequently a small one with no interest in ranking, sitting four pages down behind every article written about the word you chose. Three pages of patience is the difference between an evening that found something and an evening that felt thorough.
And the one we find things on most often is the least technical of the five.
A seller page on a marketplace, with reviews going back four years, under almost exactly your name. It is public, it is dated, it is searchable by anybody, and it appears in no register. Half the obstacles we find for clients are found this way rather than in the official search.
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Social handles deserve one extra line because of how dates work there. A handle often carries a visible history — posts going back years, with dates on them — which makes it one of the few places where the earliest use of a name is both public and reasonably verifiable. That matters later, because the question an attorney asks first is almost always who was first.
With the discipline of what to record when you find something, because this is what makes the finding useful later.
That set is what an attorney can work from. A memory of having seen something somewhere is not.
And here is where our half ends, on purpose and without exception.
What it means depends on who was first, in what trade, where, for how long, and how the two would be seen beside each other. Every one of those is a legal assessment and none of them is ours. We show you what exists. An attorney tells you what it does.
And the instruction we would give alongside it is the uncomfortable one: do not quietly decide what it means while you are collecting it. The temptation on finding a small, distant, differently spelled business is to reason your way to its being irrelevant, and that reasoning happens before any qualified person has seen it. Collect it, record it, hand it over, and let somebody answerable form the view.
Now a feature of the system itself that nobody explains and that quietly limits every search ever run.
People imagine a register as a picture of what exists right now. It behaves much more like a queue, with things entering at one end and becoming visible some way along.
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And the consequence runs in one direction, which is the uncomfortable one.
Something filed very recently has a date. The date is what counts in a queue. Its visibility to a person searching is a separate matter from its date, and the two do not arrive together.
Which is why anybody who describes a search as being accurate “as of today” is being slightly generous with the word today. It is accurate as of the state of the index at the moment the query ran, and the index trails reality by some amount nobody publishes. That is not a scandal. It is simply the thing a search report should say about itself instead of saying clear.
So a search run this morning may not show a thing that was filed last week.
That is not a defect in the search and not an error by anybody. It is what happens in any system where entering and appearing are two different events. We print no interval for it, because the interval varies and a number here would be relied on.
Which is why the direction matters.
The thing you cannot see is earlier than you. Nothing about having been unable to see it changes its position in the queue, and this is the single structural reason a search can never be a clearance even when it is run perfectly.
With the version of this that is visible and still gets dismissed.
Something in the queue, not yet registered, looks thin on screen — no certificate, no history, possibly abandoned next month. It may also be ahead of you. Whether it stands in your way is for an attorney to assess on your facts; the practical point for searching is that you cannot set it aside because it is incomplete, and the objection reply guide deals with what happens when one of these is cited against you.
Fairness requires the other direction too, and it is the pleasant one.
Things leave the queue. Something visible today may be withdrawn, abandoned or allowed to lapse, and a renewal that nobody attended to can change the picture entirely. Which means a search is a snapshot in both directions — and a snapshot with no date on it is not much of a record.
From which comes a small thing we insist on, and we would suggest you insist on it from anybody.
Every query, written out, with the date and the time it was run. Not a summary. The list. So that what the search covered, and when, is a matter of record rather than of anybody’s recollection a year later.
It also makes a second search before filing a sensible, cheap habit rather than a sign that the first one was inadequate. Weeks pass between settling on a name and actually filing, and the queue moves during them. Running the same list again on the morning of the filing costs very little and occasionally changes the decision, which is the only reason worth doing anything.
And the reason is not ceremony.
If something surfaces three months later that was filed before your search, the only way to know whether it could have been seen is to know exactly when you looked and exactly what you looked for. A dated query list answers that in one minute. A report saying “searches were conducted” answers nothing.
Now the trap that catches the careful rather than the careless, which makes it worth a section of its own.
Filings are organised into categories. A founder learns which category their goods fall into, searches it, finds nothing, and treats the exercise as complete.
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The appeal of searching one category is obvious and it is not laziness. It makes the task finite. A founder wants to be able to finish this step and move on, and a single category gives the exercise a boundary and an end. Administratively that boundary exists; commercially it does not, and the expensive surprises all live in the space between those two facts.
Because the categories are an administrative convenience for organising filings.
They are not a wall around your business, and a conflict does not politely stay inside one. We are deliberately not going into how that works, because that is doctrine and it belongs with an attorney — the operational consequence is all we need here.
And the operational consequence comes from how businesses behave rather than from any rule.
A business that sells one thing adds a second. A snack brand adds a beverage. A clothing label adds bags. A software product adds a service. Nobody stays in the category they registered in, and the name goes with them when they move.
It is also the input we most often have to ask twice for, because founders answer the question modestly. “We only do this one product” is almost always true on the day it is said and almost never true three years later. The useful answer is not what you have decided to sell; it is what you would say yes to if a buyer asked you for it next season.
Which makes a question about the future part of a search about the present.
What will this business plausibly sell in two or three years? You are the only person who can answer that, and the answer changes what should be searched today. We will ask you, and the answer is more useful to the search than anything else you can tell us.
So the working instruction, and it costs nothing extra to follow.
Search the categories the business plausibly touches now or soon, not the one it invoices in this month.
A wide search is cheap. A narrow search that missed the trade next door is paid for with a rebrand, and the rebrand arrives at the exact moment the business was expanding.
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Services beside goods is the adjacency people miss most reliably. A business that makes a thing eventually offers something around the thing — installation, training, repair, a subscription — and that is a different side of the register from the product entirely. Nobody searching for a product name thinks to look at the service side, and the business will be standing in it within two years.
And the adjacency that bites is usually one nobody listed as adjacent.
| What the business sells | Where the awkward neighbour usually turns up |
|---|---|
| Packaged food | Drinks, and restaurants using the same word on a board |
| Clothing | Footwear, bags, and anybody retailing both |
| A software product | The service built around the same kind of software |
| Cosmetics | Soaps, and anything described as wellness |
| Hardware or fittings | The contracting trade that installs them |
| Education material | Coaching and training services |
That table is an observation about where we keep finding things, not a statement about what conflicts with what. Which categories matter for you is a question for whoever will file, and getting that wrong is dearer than searching too widely.
And we ask you one question before any of it: what would you be unhappy to discover six months after launch? The answer is usually specific — a competitor two districts away, a bigger brand in a related line, somebody with a similar name on a marketplace — and it directs the searching better than any checklist, because it is the only part of this nobody but you can supply.
Described as plainly as we can, so there is nothing to interpret.
The register, across the categories you and we identify together, with the full variant list. And separately the market side — web, company and firm names, domains, marketplaces, social handles, and the specific trade. Each query written out, dated and timed.
A word is owed about the market half, in both directions. It is a real search of material that is public, and exhaustive is something it cannot be: a shop with a board and no internet presence at all is invisible to everybody, including us. We say so in the report rather than letting its absence read as its non-existence, which is the same discipline as everything else on this page.
With the firmest line on this page, stated before you order rather than after.
We will not say that a mark is available, registrable, free to use, safe to adopt, or similar or dissimilar to anything we found. Not in the report, not in an email, and not on the phone when you ask us what we think.
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And the reason is not timidity, which is how it sometimes reads.
Those are legal conclusions with a body of reasoning behind them and professional responsibility attached to making them. Coming from whoever typed the queries, such a view would carry no authority and would be relied on anyway — and that pairing is exactly what does the damage.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it
And when you ask us anyway — which almost everybody does, usually at the end of the call, usually phrased as “but off the record, what do you think?” — the answer will be the same one. Not because of a policy we are hiding behind, but because the value of a view is entirely a function of who is answerable for it, and we are not answerable for this one. An off-the-record opinion is the most dangerous kind, because it gets acted on and nobody owns it.
Which makes the sequence worth stating, because people get it backwards and pay for it.
Search first, then advice, then filing. An attorney reading a dated, organised set of findings forms a view quickly. An attorney starting from a bare name does the searching themselves at a professional rate, and the searching is the same searching. What should not happen is filing before either — and an online consultation after the search and before the money is the cheapest half-hour in the whole exercise.
Now the answer founders like least, and we would rather give it than be popular.
The most valuable thing a search can produce is a decision not to use the name. Not a confirmation. Not reassurance. A no, arriving early enough to act on.
And founders do take it, more often than the tone of this page suggests. The ones who hear a clear reason to stop, early, with the evidence in front of them, mostly change the name within a fortnight and are relieved about it inside a month. The resistance is almost entirely before the finding, not after it — which is another argument for getting the finding early.
And the reason that is valuable rather than disappointing is entirely about timing.
There is exactly one week in a brand’s life when changing its name costs nothing. It is this one.
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Because what makes a name expensive to change is not the name. It is everything that has been attached to it.
On day four none of that exists. On day four hundred all of it does, and the same decision is now a project with a budget.
There is a quieter version of this cost that applies even when nothing is contested. A name you are privately unsure about is a name you hesitate over — you delay the signage, you put off the packaging run, you keep the second option alive in a note on your phone. That hesitation has its own price in months, and a dated search either removes it or ends it. Either outcome is better than carrying it.
And the item that cannot be reprinted at any price is the one nobody puts in the calculation.
People who ask for you by that name. A reseller whose customers do. Search results that took two years to accumulate. That is the part of a rebrand that is genuinely lost rather than merely paid for, and it is invisible in week one because it has not been built yet.
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So the honest way to value this step, which is unlike how any other service is valued.
Nothing visible arrives. There is no certificate, no number, no document anybody will ever ask you for. What you get, when it works, is a cost that never happened — and a cost that never happened is the hardest kind of value for anybody to feel.
We have seen the other version of this often enough to describe it without naming anybody.
A founder is offered the search, declines it, and files. Not out of carelessness — they had already settled on the name, chosen a logo, told their family. The search was declined because it might have produced an answer that required action.
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We would add one thing about how those stories actually begin, because it is never a decision to skip the search. It is a sequence of small priorities: the logo first, then the packaging quote, then the fair booking, and the search stays on the list without ever reaching the top. Nobody declines it. It simply never becomes this week’s task, and then it is too late to be useful.
What follows is not dramatic and it is long.
Something was cited. The filing stalled. There was correspondence, then advice, then a decision about whether to fight or move, taken eighteen months in with packaging in a warehouse. The sum of it, in every case we have watched, was many multiples of a search — and the worst part was never the money. It was the year.
Which identifies the actual difficulty in this step, and it is not price and not complexity.
By the time most people ask about searching, they are attached to the name. It is on a mock-up, it has been said out loud to people, it feels like the business. Nobody wants to commission an answer they would have to obey.
If you notice yourself hoping the search comes back empty, that is the feeling to act against. The question is not whether you like the name. It is whether you would rather find out now, for very little, or later, for a great deal.
Being exact about our half, since this page has spent a long time on what a search cannot do.
We certify nothing. We do not state that a search was exhaustive, that a mark is free, that nothing exists, or that any particular query list was sufficient. What we state is what we ran, when, and what came back — which is the only thing anybody can honestly state about a search.
Set out so you know what to ask somebody else.
Every one of those is a legal judgement on your facts. Answer one of them on a web page and you are answering for a reader who is an average of everybody, which is to say for nobody at all.
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And a last table of the beliefs that do the damage, taken from the people who came to us after filing rather than before.
| What was believed | What was the case |
|---|---|
| The search came back clear | One query came back empty, which is not the same statement |
| The report said available | No search can establish that; the word was a habit |
| I searched the exact name | The obstacle was spelled differently and sounded the same |
| They are not registered, so it is fine | Unregistered use is invisible to a register and not to the law |
| The register showed nothing today | Something filed last week was not yet visible and was earlier |
| I checked my own category | The conflict was in the trade next door, which is where it usually is |
None of those is foolish. Each is a reasonable reading of a result by somebody who was never told that a blank and a hit are different kinds of evidence.
The people who order this arrive in five fairly recognisable situations.
The first is the one we would most like more of. The last is the one that tells you this step and legal advice are two different things, done best by two different people in that order.
Two of those items deserve underlining because they are the ones clients did not expect to want and later do. The named list of categories we did not cover is what lets an attorney see the shape of the gap rather than guess at it. And the statement of what the method structurally cannot reach is what stops the document being read, a year later by a person who was never on the call, as though it were a clean bill of health.
The deliverable, item by item, so nothing has to be imagined.
One rule of ours that occasionally puzzles people.
Nothing is dated to suit anybody. A query run on Tuesday carries Tuesday. If you ask us to re-run the searches before a filing, that is a fresh search with fresh dates rather than a refreshed old one, because a search is only ever a statement about a moment.
To be exact about who answers for what in this exercise.
| The part | Whose it is |
|---|---|
| Any opinion on availability, registrability or similarity | A trade-mark attorney’s or an advocate’s |
| Choosing the categories to file in | The same professional’s |
| Filing, prosecuting and answering objections | Theirs, with their name on it |
| Deciding whether to keep or change the name | Yours, on their advice |
| Telling us what the business will plausibly sell next | Yours, and nobody else can |
| Building the variant list, running it, recording it | Ours |
That bottom row is the whole of our half, and we would rather it be narrow and reliable than wide and worthless.
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Last, the fee, stated as plainly here as anywhere else on this site.
We charge ₹999 for the searching and the record described above, normally back to you within Same day – 2 days. It buys queries and a document. It does not buy an opinion, because we do not sell one.
An attorney’s charge for advice or for a filing sits between the two of you, and the registry’s own charges are a third thing again. If somebody offers you a search and an assurance in one package for one fee, the assurance is the part that is free to give and worth nothing. Where the name survives the search, the next steps are a registration and, in time, a renewal diary; where a brand is being bought, sold or licensed, an assignment is its own exercise. A copyright on the artwork, a barcode for the carton and an MSME registration tend to arrive on the same week’s list, and a startup registration where it fits.
The same gap appears when a company is renamed rather than newly formed. Company name change explains why a name allotted by the registry has answered one question and not the other, and why the search belongs before the signage is ordered.
Once a mark is on the register the work changes shape entirely: nothing is re-examined again, so it can only be lost by a date going by. See trademark renewal — in particular on why the reminder is addressed to a record rather than to you.
A report settles what to call the thing; it does not settle what happens after the papers go in. Two periods decide that, one of them opened by a notice nobody posts to you, and both are mapped on our trademark registration page.
We build the variant list across sound, script, spacing, plurals and device forms, query the register across the categories your business plausibly touches now and soon, check the market side where unregistered use actually appears, and hand you every query written out, dated and timed, with images and a statement of what a search cannot cover. We write no conclusion: availability, registrability and similarity are a trade-mark attorney’s or an advocate’s judgement, engaged and paid by you directly.
What is missing from this page on purpose, and the reasoning for each absence
Not here: any category number or the content of any category; any section, rule or decided case; any registry fee or attorney’s fee; any interval for how long a filing takes to become visible; any statement about whether any particular name is free; any test for when two marks are too close; and any view on what an unregistered user can do about you. On a page about checking a brand name, almost nothing concrete is left of what brings people to this subject in the first place.
Three reasons sit behind that and the third decides the other two. Fees and intervals are absent because they move and because a figure on a page keeps steering decisions after it stops being accurate. Category content is absent because printing it invites a founder to classify themselves, which is the one job in this exercise where being approximately right is the same as being wrong. And the reason that governs everything: a test for similarity, printed on the website of the people who ran your searches, would be used as a verdict. That is the precise harm. Somebody would read it, compare their name to what we found, conclude they were fine, and spend a year on it — with nobody qualified ever having looked. So this page carries the method and withholds the judgement, and it says so rather than pretending the judgement does not exist.
Take every specific away and the frame underneath stands on its own. That a hit and a blank are not two answers to one question but two different kinds of thing, one evidence and one the absence of it, so a search can produce a reason to stop and never permission to proceed. That a blank has four possible causes and only one of them is “nothing is there”. That the breadth of any search was decided before it ran, by whoever chose the strings, which puts the skill in the variant list rather than in reading results. That rights exist outside every register, so the only place with a search box is one of two places to look. That a register behaves as a queue, so the thing you cannot see may be earlier than you and nothing about your inability to see it changes that. That filing categories organise paperwork and do not fence a business, and businesses move. And that the most valuable result is a decision to change the name, in the one week when that is free.
Of everything above, the part we would keep is the evening you spend on it yourself. Web search, company and firm names, domains, the big marketplaces, social handles, your own trade. Free, unskilled, and in our files it turns up roughly half of everything worth finding — because an unregistered business is invisible to a register and extremely visible to a search engine. Founders who pay for the register half and skip the free half have bought the harder part and left the easier one undone, and we would rather say so on our own service page than take the money quietly.
The places to go instead of this page. A trade-mark attorney or an advocate, for every question of availability, registrability, similarity, categories and what to do about anything already found or already printed — after the searching and before the filing, which is the cheap order. To the register’s own search for the official position, as of the moment you look at it. To the open market for the half no register holds. To whoever will file, for which categories apply to you. And to your own plans for the one input nobody else has: what this business will plausibly be selling in three years.
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