I have named a lot of side projects, and for years I got the order wrong. Brainstorm a name, check the .com, fall in love, ship. The trademark check was the thing I did last, if at all. That is exactly backwards, because the domain being free tells you nothing about whether someone already owns the name.
So here is the process I use now, written the way I wish someone had handed it to me. It is free, it takes a few minutes, and it happens in a place that changed recently enough that most guides online are out of date.
TESS is gone
If you learned to search US trademarks before 2024, the tool you remember no longer exists. The USPTO retired TESS, the Trademark Electronic Search System, on November 30, 2023, and replaced it with a cloud system called Trademark Search at tmsearch.uspto.gov. Old TESS links redirect there now. Any tutorial still telling you to open TESS is describing a system that was switched off.
The new system is free and needs no account to search. It gives you two ways in:
- A simple search box for quick lookups. This is where a first pass starts.
- An expert query builder for precise work: field tags, wildcards to catch spelling variants, and Boolean operators.
The knockout search
A knockout search is the fast first look. You are checking the federal register for identical or near-identical marks in classes related to what you sell, so you can rule out the obvious conflicts before you invest anything.
To run one at tmsearch.uspto.gov:
- Search the exact name. Enter it as you would write it. The system is not case sensitive.
- Search close variants. Misspellings, spacing changes, dropped or doubled letters, plurals. Wildcards in the expert builder catch a family of spellings at once.
- Search how it sounds. A mark that sounds the same can conflict even when it is spelled differently, so search phonetic equivalents, not just the letters.
- Read the live results in your classes. Focus on marks with a live status in the classes that match your goods or services. A dead mark, or a live mark in an unrelated class, is usually not your problem.
The class matters more than the name
This is the part most first-time searchers miss. Trademark protection is not granted over a word in the abstract. It is granted for particular goods or services. A conflict exists when a similar mark covers the same or related goods or services as yours, which is why two identical names can coexist peacefully in unrelated industries.
The USPTO uses the international Nice Classification, which sorts everything into 45 classes: classes 1 to 34 are goods, 35 to 45 are services. Before you judge a result, know which classes your business falls into, because a hit outside them rarely blocks you. The USPTO also publishes a Trademark ID Manual, a searchable list of pre-approved descriptions of goods and services, which is the fastest way to pin down your class.
What a knockout search does not catch
Finding nothing is not the same as being clear. A federal register search, however careful, has blind spots you should know before you rely on it:
- Sound-alike spellings you did not think to try.
- Related, not identical, goods. A mark for a neighbouring product can still block you, and judging how related is related is the grey area a quick search skips.
- Common-law rights. In the US, rights arise from use, so a business using a name in commerce can have enforceable rights without ever filing federally. Those marks are not in the register.
- State registrations. Each state keeps its own register, outside the USPTO database.
Closing those gaps is what a full clearance search does, and the USPTO frames that as the search an attorney conducts. A knockout is the right first filter. It is not a clearance opinion, and it is not legal advice. Treat a clean result as "worth a closer look," never as "safe to build on."
If the name survives: filing
Once a name survives your search and you decide to file, that is a separate step in a separate place. Since January 18, 2025, the only way to file a US trademark application is through Trademark Center at tmcenter.uspto.gov. The old TEAS system was retired at the same time, so any fee quote built on TEAS tiers is out of date. The current base application fee is $350 per class. Fees change, so confirm the current schedule on uspto.gov before you file.
One thing the USPTO is blunt about: a search never guarantees registration, an examining attorney may reach a different conclusion than you did, and filing fees are not refunded if the application is refused. That is the whole reason searching well before you file is worth the few minutes.
The tool I built around this
Doing this by hand is the right way to learn it, but it is slow when you are weighing a dozen candidate names. That gap is why I built Startup Name Generator. It only surfaces names whose .com is available, checked live against domain records at generation time, then runs a free US (USPTO) register search on the one you pick, with exact, phonetic, and fuzzy matching. No login. The EU (EUIPO) register is the one paid step, for people naming for Europe.
To be clear about what it is, because I care about not overclaiming: the trademark check is an automated register search that surfaces conflicts for you to review. It is not legal advice and not a clearance opinion. For anything you are betting a company on, a lawyer still does the clearance. But for the first cut, it saves you from falling for a name you cannot own.
Name the thing once. Search before you commit.
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