← TM Watch — free instant similarity check

You can watch your own trademark for free. Here is exactly how — and what it costs you in time.

Trademark watching is not secret knowledge and it is not a licensed activity. The data is public, the routine is mechanical, and everything you need to run it is on this site at no charge. What follows is the honest version: the weekly steps, the volume you are actually reading, the part that quietly gets skipped, and the point where paying someone $29 a year starts to make sense. We sell a watch, so read this with that in mind — which is also why every number here is measured from the same public files you can download.

The routine, every Tuesday

1. Open that week's issue. The USPTO publishes the Trademark Official Gazette every Tuesday. Every mark approved for publication that week appears in it, and the 30-day opposition clock for each of those marks starts on that date.
2. Cut it down to your classes. Nobody reads the whole issue. Our newly published marks by class pages do this split for you — 45 pages, rebuilt after every issue, no login — and the per-issue CSVs on the data page are the same rows if you would rather grep them.
3. Read for confusion, not for spelling. A §2(d) refusal turns on sound, appearance, meaning and commercial impression, so the hits that matter are usually not exact matches of your name. This is the step that needs judgement and the step a plain Ctrl-F cannot do.
4. Check anything that worries you on TSDR. Every mark on our pages links straight to its live USPTO status record, where the publication date, owner and goods description are authoritative.
5. Diary the deadline. If you might oppose, the date to protect is 30 days from that publication date — see what happens in the opposition window for the extension ladder and the fees.
6. Do it again next week. Forever.

What you are actually reading, measured

These are counts of the rows we publish, not estimates: the per-issue CSVs are on the data page and you can recount them yourself. Data through 2026-09-01.

Suppose you are diligent and you narrow to that one busiest class. Reading 1,429 names at one per second, without pausing to think about any of them, is about 24 minutes — and that is the arithmetic, not a study. Fifty-two weeks of it is roughly 20.6 hours a year of skimming in which the only acceptable error rate is zero, because the thing you are looking for shows up perhaps once.

Where the DIY routine actually breaks

Not on week one. Week one is fine — you are motivated, you just filed. It breaks in these three places:

1. Attention decay. The routine has no feedback: doing it perfectly and doing it not at all look identical for years, right up until the week they don't.
2. Near-misses. Eyes match spellings; the Board matches impressions. Phonetic equivalents, one-letter drops, a shared rare word inside a longer name — all of those are ordinary §2(d) grounds and all of them survive a skim.
3. Scope creep. The relevant class list is rarely just yours; related goods and services count too, and each class you add is another few thousand names a week.

The free way to do it better

Before you pay anyone — us included — use the free surfaces here. The instant similarity check runs the same matcher our paid watch uses, in your browser, against all 361,260 marks: edit distance, phonetic codes and shared-rare-word overlap, with every hit linked to TSDR. Run it on your mark today, run it again after each Tuesday issue, and you have most of a watch for nothing. The per-issue CSVs and the source code are public too; if you would rather run the whole thing on your own machine, it is all there.

What paying changes

Exactly one thing: it happens whether or not you remember. After each issue we run your mark through the matcher, write the hits to a private alert page and an RSS feed, and keep doing that for the term you bought. No dashboard to log into, no card on file, no auto-renewal. Email alerts are not built yet and we say so on every page until they are.

Honest limits: we watch word marks from the US Gazette, not design marks, not international registers, and we do not give legal opinions or file anything for you. If you need those, the comparison page lists the paid services that do, with dated prices — including the ones that beat us.