Your first trademark search

This walkthrough takes about two minutes and costs nothing beyond one of your monthly searches.

1. Open the search form

Go to app.demarka.io. The home page is the search form. It has two tabs — Simple search and Advanced search. Start with Simple.

2. Enter the trademark name

Type the name you are considering. Spelling matters less than you would expect: Demarka matches on sound, on visual lookalikes, on transliteration between scripts and on several other mechanisms, so near-misses still surface.

3. Choose countries

Pick every market where you actually plan to trade. Demarka automatically widens the retrieval for you: asking for Germany also searches the EU trademark register and the WIPO Madrid system, because a mark registered there is in force in Germany too.

4. Choose NICE classes

Trademarks are only protected for the goods and services they cover, grouped into 45 numbered classes. You have three ways to pick them:

• Browse classes — select from the grid if you already know your numbers.
• Help me choose — answer a few questions about what you sell and let Demarka propose classes.
• The guided wizard, if you would rather be walked through the whole search.

If you are unsure, use Help me choose. Getting the classes roughly right matters more than getting them perfect — see Choosing NICE classes.

5. Search

Press Search. Demarka queries every relevant register and shows a live counter of how many it has covered. Keep the page open while it runs.

6. Read what came back

Each result card shows the mark, its owner, territories, classes, filing and registration numbers, status and dates. Two things are worth looking at first:

• Why similar? — the exact mechanisms that matched, so you can judge whether the hit is meaningful or noise.
• Status — a lapsed or withdrawn mark is far less of a problem than a live registration.

A long result list is not automatically bad news. Most hits are in unrelated classes or unrelated markets. What matters is a live, similar mark held by someone else, in your classes, in your country.

7. Decide what to do next

• Save the search if you want to come back to it, add notes or share it.
• Assess the name if it looks viable and you need a filing decision — this is the paid, in-depth step.
• Monitor the name if you want to be told when new conflicting filings appear.
• Or change the name and search again.

What it costs

On the Free plan you get 5 new searches per calendar month. Paging through, filtering and sorting results you already have is free and unlimited, and re-running an identical query in the same month does not count again. Paid plans have unlimited search.