How to see and track a competitor's trade marks in Australia

Every trade mark application lists the goods and services it's for, grouped into numbered classes. So a company's filings show the names it has applied for and the kinds of goods and services it has named them for, all on a public record.

IP Australia's IP First Response site makes the same point about rival filings. Its page on monitoring the register for competitor activity says monitoring helps you have an overview of the gaps and trends in rival trade mark filings, and that anyone planning to register a trade mark or launch a brand can monitor filings to observe trends. The same page lists a second reason: spotting new brands that may be too similar to yours early, while there's still time to respond.

The search itself takes a few minutes. These steps follow IP Australia's help page for Australian Trade Mark Search.

1. Find the company's exact name and number. ABN Lookup, the Australian Business Register's free search, shows a business's ABN and, for a company, its ACN.
2. Try the quick search. Type the company's name into Australian Trade Mark Search. The help page says the quick search looks across trade mark words, owner names, trade mark numbers and International Registration numbers, so results can include marks whose words merely match the name.
3. Narrow it with the advanced search. Its name field searches the party you pick from a menu, such as the owner. It also has a field for the ABN, ACN or ARBN of a trade mark's owner.
4. Open each record. Read its status, its classes, the goods and services it lists and its dates.
5. Save the search. IP Australia's help page says every advanced search you run is saved to a My Searches list, so the same search can be run again later.

Search by name and by number, because each finds filings the other can miss. In our records, only 35% of the 76,582 applications filed by organisations in the 12 months to 27 September 2026 had an ABN recorded in IP Australia's data. For owners with an Australian address it was 57%. And 46% of those applications came from organisations with an overseas address, such as China (9,143) and the United States (8,892).

A search for one company also won't show filings made in another name. A business can file through a related company or a trustee, or in a person's own name, and those filings sit under that other owner.

The status says where each filing is. A pending application is still with IP Australia, a registered mark is on the register, and a lapsed or refused one isn't. Our guide to doing a trade mark search explains each status group.

An application isn't a registration. Of the 22,327 applications filed between October and December 2024, 76% were on the register by 27 September 2026 and 19% had lapsed. Our guide on how long a trade mark takes to register has the rest of those figures.

The classes say what the filing covers in broad terms, and the goods and services say it exactly. Our list of all 45 classes gives a plain summary of each and how many applications were filed in it recently.

The dates matter if a competitor's filing looks close to your own name. Once an application's acceptance is advertised, anyone has two months to oppose it (the opposition period). Our guide on how to oppose a trade mark sets out each step, deadline and fee.

We hold IP Australia's records for every application filed since 27 September 2024. In the 12 months to 27 September 2026:

• Organisations filed 76,582 of the 97,811 applications (78%). Individuals filed 21,225.
• 44,728 different organisations filed at least once.
• 30,947 of them (69%) filed once. The other 13,781 filed two or more times and made 60% of all organisations' applications.
• 442 organisations filed 10 or more applications, 7,881 between them.

Companies also move into new classes. 7,037 organisations filed in both that year and the 12 months before it. 3,284 of them (47%) filed in at least one class they hadn't used in the earlier year.

A single search shows what's on the register today. New applications keep arriving: in our records, about 8,150 a month in the 12 months to 27 September 2026.

IP Australia's monitoring page describes two ways to keep up. You can do it yourself with Australian Trade Mark Search and its saved searches, which the page says is free apart from your time. A quick manual check can take minutes, and the page says reviewing saved searches may become a short weekly task. Or you can pay a service. The page says commercial monitoring services typically start from a few hundred dollars a year for one class, rising with extra classes or overseas coverage, and that even with one you still need time to review the results.

Two kinds of service answer different questions. A trade mark watch looks for new filings with names similar to yours, whoever files them. A competitor watch looks for anything a company you name files, whatever the name.

CopyCatcher does both. With competitor watch, you pick companies from the organisations that have filed Australian trade marks in the last 2 years. Each new filing is compared with them. When the owner's ABN or ACN matches, the filing is listed in your dashboard and emailed to you. When only the name matches, we review it first. You get at most one competitor email a day, listing the filing's words, classes, filing date, status and a link to IP Australia. Individuals can't be watched. Our pricing shows which plans include it.

For overseas registers, IP First Response points to WIPO's Global Brand Database, which searches trade marks from many national offices at once.