Business name search directory: what each register holds

A business name can be recorded in half a dozen unrelated places, run by unrelated bodies, under unrelated rules. None of them is a master list. Each answers one narrow question about the name. Name work goes wrong when people ask one of them a question that belongs to another.

This business name search directory maps those places: who keeps each one, what a record in it establishes, and which question it cannot touch. It names the offices and registers, and lists no web addresses for the state offices, for a reason set out further down.

What to take away

The places a name can live

The state entity index. Kept by each state's filing office. Delaware's is the Division of Corporations, California's the Secretary of State, New York's the Department of State, Texas's the Secretary of State, and Florida's the Division of Corporations. The record holds the legal names of entities formed or registered there, along with the entity number, the filing date, the current status and the registered agent on file. A record here means an entity of that name exists on that state's list. It carries nothing about rights, and nothing about any other state.

The assumed name index. Trade names, DBAs, fictitious names. Kept by the state filing office in some jurisdictions — Florida's fictitious name register sits with the Division of Corporations — and by a county office in others, as in California and New York, where the statement goes to the county clerk. Texas splits the two: a sole proprietorship or general partnership files an assumed name certificate with the county clerk, a corporation or LLC with the Secretary of State. It is not required at all for some arrangements. This is the record that links a trading name to a legal entity, and its absence is common and usually innocent.

State trademark registers. Kept by state agencies — in California and Texas, the Secretary of State — separate from federal registration and much narrower in effect. A record there holds the mark, the goods or services it covers, and the owner. Worth searching when you are clearing a name for use, rarely relevant when you are checking a counterparty.

The federal trademark register. Kept by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and searchable from its own trademark database. Holds registrations and applications, organized by classes of goods and services. There is only one of these, which is why naming it here carries none of the risk that listing fifty state addresses would. It is the closest thing to an authority on names used in trade, and it is still not a complete picture of who holds rights.

Use in trade, which has no register. Rights in a name can arise from actually using it in business, without anyone filing anything. There is no index of this. You find it by looking at the market: sector directories, trade press, marketplaces, app stores, and ordinary web search. This is the gap that catches people who searched only registers.

Domain and handle registries. Kept by registrars and platforms. GoDaddy and Namecheap are names you will meet among the registrars, ICANN is the body that accredits them, and handles live with the platforms themselves. A registration is a contract for a string, not a right in a name. Useful evidence about who else is out there, decisive for marketing, and not a legal answer to anything.

Licensing bodies with name rules. Professional and regulated trades often have rules about what a practice may call itself, and the rule lives with the regulator: the State Bar of California for lawyers, the Texas Medical Board for physicians, a state board of accountancy for accountants. That is not the filing office, and the regulator's rule can override a name the filing office was happy to accept.

Which keeper answers which question

The last row belongs to a different exercise from the six above it. Checking a name you intend to use and checking a name somebody gave you are separate jobs, and the sequence for the second is in company verification.

Why this page lists no addresses

Web addresses for government offices change, and a list of them ages into a set of dead links and, worse, links that now point somewhere else. More to the point, a memorized or copied address is precisely the weakness that paid imitations exploit.

The durable method is to arrive from the keeper's own front door: the state's official portal for a filing office, the trademark office's own site for the federal register, the regulator's own site for a licensing rule.

Check the address bar before you type anything, and treat the domain as the only credential that matters. Seals, layouts, and official-sounding names are copied trivially. The route to the office of record, and the general shape of the imitation problem, is covered in state entity directories.

The imitations you meet specifically around names

Name work attracts its own kinds of intermediaries, distinct from the ones that sell copies of filed records.

The pattern is the ordinary shape of an approach that charges for something free and manufactures a deadline. The Federal Trade Commission's consumer guidance on avoiding scams describes the other side.

None of this means paying for help is wrong. It means knowing whether you are paying for expertise or for a free search with a wrapper, and the way you tell is to look at the free version first. The staged sequence of checks worth running yourself is in the name check ladder.

Common questions

Is there a national business name register I am missing?

No. Entity registration is a state function, and the federal register that matters for names is the trademark register, which records something different. Any site presenting itself as a single national list of business names is aggregating state data, and it is a copy.

A name is free in my state's index. Does that mean nobody in the country is using it?

No. It means it is not on that one list today. The same name may be registered in another state by unrelated people, and may be in use nationally by a business that never registered anything.

Which register should I search first?

The one that can kill the name most cheaply, which is usually your own state's entity index and a plain search of the market. Save the trademark work for names that survive both, and get professional help for a name you intend to build on, as set out in business name search.