Trademark Search Australia: How to Check if a Name or Logo is Taken

You put your brand name here, and the Part / Whole dropdown controls how strictly the tool matches it. "Part" finds your word even when it sits inside a longer word, which casts a wider net and surfaces marks that merely contain your name; "Whole" matches only the exact word on its own. The AND / OR dropdown and the second box let you test two words together, and the plus button adds further rows. Start with "Part" so you see as much as possible, and run a few variations as well, such as common misspellings or words that sound the same, because marks are judged by how they look and sound, not just by an exact match.

The Image field, and the "image terms" link beside it, let you search logos by their visual content rather than any words they contain. IP Australia codes every figurative mark by the elements it includes, such as a particular shape, an animal or a device, and this field searches against those codes, which you choose through the "image terms" link. It is more powerful than the image upload on Quick search and matters most when your brand is built around a distinctive graphic, because a competing logo can be a problem even if its wording is nothing like yours.

For a slogan or tagline of several words, where the combination and order are the point. It searches the words together as a phrase rather than hunting for each one separately, and ticking the Single box tells the tool to treat your entry as one exact string. Use it when you want to know whether a specific phrase is already claimed, rather than whether the individual words happen to appear somewhere on the register.

These filter by where a mark sits in its life cycle, from a pending application through to registered, lapsed, removed or refused. In practice it is easier to leave both on "All" and read the status against each result, using the status table further down this page, because a mark does not have to be fully registered to cause trouble. A pending application with an earlier filing date can still block you, and a recently lapsed mark can sometimes be restored, so it pays to look rather than filter these out too early.

Set to "Lodgement" by default, with "From" and "To" boxes, this filters by when marks were lodged, and it matters more than it first appears. Australian trademark law generally gives priority to whoever filed first, so the lodgement date is what decides who has the stronger claim. A mark lodged before yours is the one with the power to block you; one lodged after usually cannot. When you find a potential conflict, the first thing to check is whether its lodgement date falls before or after the date you intend to file.

These narrow your results to particular categories of mark, such as standard marks versus collective or certification marks. Most can be left alone on a first pass. The one worth setting is Exclude inactive, which hides dead marks so you are left looking only at the live rights that can genuinely be asserted against you, keeping the result list short and relevant while you get your bearings.

This searches the actual written descriptions of what each mark covers, rather than just its class number. It is how you tell whether an existing mark in your class really competes with you or simply shares the same broad heading, since two businesses can sit in the same class while operating in entirely different corners of it. Reading the wording closely here often turns an apparent conflict into a non-issue, or the reverse.

Set to "Owner", along with Address for service and the ABN/ACN/ARBN (owner) field, these search by who owns a mark rather than by the mark itself. This is how you pull up a competitor's entire portfolio in one go, confirm who actually controls a mark you are concerned about, or check what a company has already protected before you approach them. Owner searching is precise, so try a few variations of a company name if the first attempt comes back thin.

For going straight to a specific application or registration when you already know its number. "IR" stands for International Registration, a trademark filed through the international Madrid system and then extended to cover Australia. These are easy to miss in an ordinary name search but carry exactly the same weight as a locally filed mark, so a foreign brand that has designated Australia can still stand in your way.

These filter by entries in IP Australia's official journal, which records steps such as acceptance and opposition. They are specialist tools used mainly by practitioners tracking deadlines, and you can safely ignore them for a clearance search.