How to check if a business name is taken

Roughly half a million business applications are filed in the United States every month (3,079,268 in the first half of 2026, according to the Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics). Nearly all of those founders check one thing before they pick a name: whether their state will let them register it. That check answers a narrow question, and a name that passes it can still be owned by someone else in every way that matters. Here are the five places a name can be taken, in the order to check them, and what each answer means.

1. The federal trademark register

Start here, because it is the check with the largest consequences. Search the USPTO's trademark database for the name and for anything that sounds like it. For each record that comes back, read three fields: the status (live or dead), the international class (which kind of goods or services it covers), and the owner.

What the results mean:

• A live mark, same or similar name, your class or a related one. The name is taken. Choose another, or talk to a trademark attorney about whether the goods are different enough to coexist.
• A live mark, same name, unrelated class. Probably usable, unless the mark is famous. Delta Air Lines and Delta faucets coexist; nobody gets to open a cafe called Google.
• Only dead marks (abandoned or cancelled). Clear on the register. Someone once wanted the name, which makes the web check below more important.
• Nothing. Clear on the register.

The register is free to search and a careful search takes twenty minutes. A screening tool does the same search with phonetic variants in seconds; BetterNamer runs it on every name it generates and shows the matches, their status and their classes.

2. The live web

A business does not need a trademark registration to have rights in its name. In the United States, rights come from use in commerce, and a company that has traded under a name in its market since 2019 can have priority over a registration you file in 2026, at least in the area where it trades. The only way to find those businesses is to look for them.

Search the exact name in quotation marks. Quotes matter: an unquoted search for a coined name gets reinterpreted as the nearest common word (CodeB becomes pages about code), and the real CodeB companies never appear. Then read who owns the results:

• The name in a page title or a domain name: an active business or product. Taken, in that market.
• The name mentioned in a page but not as a title: a weaker signal; read the page.
• Near-matches: Summit Roast, summit-roast.com, SummitRoasters. These are the ones a customer will confuse with you, and the ones a trademark examiner will too.
• Nothing: clear, for now.

Check the major social platforms in the same pass. A handle that is taken is not a legal problem, but a brand whose Instagram handle belongs to a dormant account from 2016 is a brand that will spend years explaining its underscore.

3. The domain

Third, not first. A domain check tells you whether a specific string with a specific extension is registered; it tells you nothing about ownership of the name. Having said that, what the .com shows you is useful:

• .com available. Good. Also a mild signal that nobody has built a consumer business on the name.
• .com taken and pointing at an active business. Read step 2 again with that business in mind. If they are in your field, the name is taken whatever the register says.
• .com taken and parked or for sale. The name is clear from an ownership point of view, and the domain is a purchase decision: aftermarket prices for short, clean .com names run from hundreds to many thousands of dollars.
• .com taken, other extensions available. Fine for a product that lives on the web and is reached by link; a liability for a brand that will be spoken aloud and typed, because a fraction of those people will land on the .com.

Whichever extension you choose, read the renewal price before the registration price. On most extensions introduced since 2012 the first year is a promotion and the renewal is five to thirty times higher at wholesale.

4. Your state's business registry

This is the check most founders run first and the one that means least. Every state's Secretary of State (or equivalent) keeps a registry of entity names, and it will refuse to form your LLC or corporation under a name that is identical or deceptively similar to one already on file in that state.

What a pass means: the state will let you form the entity. What it does not mean: that you own the name, that a business in the next state is not using it, or that a federal trademark does not cover it. State registries do not check the USPTO, and the USPTO does not check state registries.

Run this check last, after the name has survived the other three, and then register the entity. If the exact name is unavailable in your state, most states allow a distinguishing word (Brightly Coffee LLC where Brightly LLC exists), though that does nothing for the trademark question.

5. The state trademark register

Separate from the entity registry, most states also keep a state-level trademark register. It is smaller than the federal one and businesses that only trade locally sometimes file there instead. It is worth a look when the business is local (a restaurant, a salon, a contractor) and the state has an online search. For a business that will trade nationally, the federal register and the web check cover this ground.

The order, and why it is that order

Trademark, web, domain, state entity, state trademark. The first two are where the expensive collisions are and where a name is most likely to fail; checking them first means the names that fail do so before anyone has grown attached. The domain check is cheap and fast but answers the least important question, so it comes after. The state registry is a formality that cannot be skipped and cannot be failed in any way that matters, so it comes last.

Do this for every candidate, not just the favourite. A shortlist of five names all checked beats one name checked and four fallbacks that have not been, because the first one fails more often than anyone expects, and the moment it fails is the worst moment to start the process again.

When to involve an attorney

A screening tells you which names are obviously taken. Before you print anything, file a trademark application, or spend money on a brand, a trademark attorney's clearance search covers what a screening does not (state registrations, common-law use through commercial databases, a lawyer's reading of how close is too close) and costs a small fraction of what a rebrand costs. Send them the shortlist, not the long list; the screening is what makes the shortlist short.