Trademark clearance search
A clearance search answers one question before you spend money on a brand: is this name or logo already taken by someone whose customers overlap with yours? Qevatrix Trademark OS runs that search against indexed United States Patent and Trademark Office records and scores every hit it finds.
What a clearance search actually has to do
Typing a name into a government search box and seeing no identical match is not clearance. Applications are refused over marks that merely sound similar, that share the distinctive word, or that cover related goods in a neighbouring class. A clearance search has to look for those, and then tell you which of the results matter.
That is the difference between a list of hits and a decision you can act on — and it is the reason a clean-looking search can still end in a refusal six months later.
How marks are matched
Exact and normalized matches
Marks are normalized the way examiners read them — punctuation, spacing, casing and common design wording stripped — so ACME-CO, Acme Co. and ACMECO land on the same result.
Phonetic matches
Marks that sound alike are surfaced even when nothing about the spelling matches: KWIKSET against QUICKSET, VERIDIAN against VIRIDIAN. Sound-alike marks are a routine basis for refusal, so they cannot be left to a string search.
Fuzzy and misspelling matches
Edit-distance matching catches inserted, dropped and transposed characters, which is where deliberately tweaked marks and typo variants live.
Dominant-word analysis
Generic and descriptive wording is discounted so the dominant portion of a mark drives the comparison. That is why a search for a two-word mark still finds a registration that shares only the distinctive half.
Conflict Score™: every hit scored factor by factor
Each result carries a Conflict Score built from four factors, each shown separately so you can see why a hit ranked where it did rather than trusting a single number:
Mark similarity
How close the marks are in appearance, sound and overall commercial impression, weighted by which portion carries the distinctiveness.
Goods and services overlap
The wording actually claimed in each filing is compared, not just the class number — two marks in the same class can serve entirely different buyers.
Class relatedness
Nice classes that are commonly treated as related are scored as such, so a conflict in an adjacent class is not silently dropped.
Registration strength
A live, incontestable registration on a coined mark weighs more heavily than a descriptive mark or a lapsed filing.
The score is a triage tool for a result list — it ranks and explains risk. It is not a legal opinion on likelihood of confusion.
Where the USPTO data comes from
The searchable index is built from USPTO's public trademark data services and refreshed on a schedule, covering live and dead records — a dead registration still tells you a name was used in your field, and a recently abandoned one can be refiled by its former owner. Case status and documents on marks you docket come from USPTO's own status and document system.
Results are informational. Always confirm what you find against the official USPTO record: Qevatrix Trademark OS is software, not a law firm, and does not provide legal advice or representation.
Three depths of search
Results can be filtered by registration status and by owner — useful when you already know which company's marks you need to exclude — and any screening exports as a branded clearance report PDF with the conflicts, risk levels and score breakdowns included.
Run a clearance search
Searching is free to start, with no credit card. If the mark is clear you can move straight into a guided filing package for a word mark or a logo; if it is not, you have just avoided a rebrand. Costs are broken down on the pricing and fees page, and common questions are answered in the FAQ. For a search framed specifically around official USPTO records, see the USPTO trademark search page.