How to Monitor for Trademark Squatters and Copycats Without Hiring a Law Firm

You don't need a $1,000/mo brand-protection contract to catch the obvious cases. Here's what actually works at small-business scale.

Once a small business has a name worth protecting, the standard advice is to "monitor for infringement" — but the tools built for that (Markify, Corsearch, CompuMark, TrademarkNow, MarkMonitor) are sold to legal and brand-protection departments at enterprise prices, and every one of them requires booking a demo before you can even see pricing. That's a mismatch for a founder or small team who just wants to know if someone files something too close to their name.

What you can do yourself, for free

1. USPTO trademark search: tmsearch.uspto.gov — search your exact mark and close variants. Repeat this periodically; a search only tells you what existed on the day you ran it.
2. WIPO Global Brand Database: covers international filings beyond just USPTO, useful if you sell or plan to sell outside the US.
3. A domain-registration check: search whether new domains containing your brand name or a close typo of it have been registered recently. There's no single free public search for this — it usually means downloading a newly-registered-domains feed and searching it yourself.
4. A weekly calendar reminder to actually re-run all of the above, since none of these tools notify you — they only answer the question at the moment you ask it.

Where this breaks down

The free approach works exactly as well as your discipline in repeating it. In practice, almost nobody re-runs three separate manual searches every week, forever, on top of running an actual business. The gap isn't that the data is hard to get — USPTO and domain registries are both public — it's that nothing is watching them for you on a schedule.

The self-serve middle ground

Between "do it yourself manually, forever" and "book a demo with an enterprise brand-protection vendor" there's not much — which is exactly the gap MarkRadar is built for: $15/month, no sales call, no contract. Tell it your brand name, and every week it checks new USPTO trademark filings and newly registered domains against it, and only emails you when something actually matches.