How to track competitor patent filings with a free manual watch

If you want to know what a competitor is patenting, you do not need a paid tool to start. Run the same two or three free searches every week, using USPTO Patent Public Search or Google Patents, filtered by the competitor's name and your CPC subclass, and copy anything new into a shared log. This guide shows how to set that up in about an hour, and what each free source can and cannot tell you today.

Under US law, a patent application is kept confidential at first. It is published "promptly after the expiration of a period of 18 months" from the earliest filing date it claims (35 U.S.C. 122(b)). That clock usually starts at the earliest application the competitor relies on, which may be a provisional or a foreign filing, so the real gap between the first filing and the day you can read it is about a year and a half.

There are two exceptions worth knowing. An applicant can ask to be published earlier. And an applicant that certifies it will not file the same invention abroad can request that the application not be published at all; in that case the first public document is the granted patent.

The USPTO publishes applications on Thursday of each week (MPEP 1120). That rhythm is why a manual watch works: new material arrives in weekly batches, so a weekly check catches everything that has become public, and the earlier you see it, the more room you have to react.

Three free sources come up when people search for this. They are good for different jobs.

PatentsView deserves a word, because many older guides send you there first. It is a USPTO database that links inventors and organizations across patent records. On March 20, 2026, it moved to the USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP), and its search, APIs and visualizations were paused, with the USPTO saying they will return in updated forms. The bulk downloads are still available on ODP, and the Q4 2025 update released on May 6, 2026 covers granted patents and pre-grant publications through December 31, 2025. The USPTO also describes the data as for research and not the official record. So use PatentsView to build a baseline of what a competitor has filed in past years, and use Patent Public Search or Google Patents for this week's publications.

The assignee is the company that owns an application. Start with each competitor's legal name.

In Patent Public Search, choose the US-PGPUB database for published applications (USPAT holds granted patents). In Advanced Search, the assignee name field is AS, written after the term, for example (acme ADJ inc).AS. In Basic Search, pick the assignee field from the field drop-down instead. Results open as a front-page preview, the full PDF or the HTML text.

In Google Patents, type assignee:"Acme Inc" (quotes for multi-word names), add country:US, and switch the date type to publication date in the search fields box.

Run the search once without any date filter to see the competitor's history, then add a date limit so each weekly run only shows the last week or two.

Every US patent and published application is classified in the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC), a scheme jointly developed by the USPTO and the European Patent Office (MPEP 905). The hierarchy runs from section to class, subclass, main group and subgroup. In the symbol A61B 5/024, for example, A is the section, A61 the class, A61B the subclass ("Diagnosis; Surgery; Identification"), 5/00 the main group ("Measuring for diagnostic purposes") and 5/024 a subgroup (measuring pulse rate or heart rate). A battery company would care about H01M instead.

A large competitor files in many areas. You only care about the few that overlap your product, so add your subclass to the search:

• In Patent Public Search, A61B.CPCL. searches the CPC subclass level, and .CPC. searches a full symbol. Leave out the space inside a symbol: A61B5/024.CPC.
• In Google Patents, cpc:A61B on the homepage, or CPC=A61B5/024/low in Advanced Search to include child codes.

To find your subclass, look up two or three patents you already know are close to your product and note the CPC codes printed on them. If they share a subclass, start there. If your product spans two areas, keep one search per subclass rather than one broad search.

Save the search as a link. Patent Public Search accepts search links, so you can bookmark a query and rerun it in one click. The USPTO's external-search guide uses this pattern, with %20 in place of spaces:

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/external.html?q=(acme%20ADJ%20inc).as.%20AND%20A61B.cpcl.&db=US-PGPUB&type=queryString

Keep one bookmark per competitor and subclass, and store the links in your log so anyone on the team can run them.

Pick one day, ideally Friday or Monday after the Thursday publication. Open each saved search, sort by date, and copy anything new into one shared list: publication date, competitor, publication number, title, CPC codes, a one-line note on why it might matter, and who has looked at it. US application publication numbers have 11 digits, the first four being the publication year.

A few habits make the log useful months later:

• Record the week even when nothing new appeared. "No new filings" is information.
• Write the "why it might matter" note in plain words: which feature, which product.
• Assign one reviewer per row and a date, so nothing waits for "someone".
• Once a quarter, rerun each competitor search with no date filter and no CPC limit, to catch anything your weekly searches were too narrow to find.

A published application is not yet a granted patent, and its claims can still change before grant. What matters is the claims, not the title or abstract. If one looks close to your product, write down which claim and which feature, keep watching its status, and bring it to a patent attorney early. Even after grant, a patent can carry a right to a reasonable royalty for use after publication if the issued claims are substantially identical to the published ones and the user had actual notice of the published application (35 U.S.C. 154(d)). That is why seeing a filing early is worth the weekly effort, and why the next step should be a professional opinion rather than a guess.

The companion guide on what to do when a competitor files a blocking patent in your CPC subclass walks through reading claims, checking status, and the official USPTO options open to third parties.