data-sources

WIPO Global Brand Database explained

May 6, 2026

If you’ve spent any time around international trademark work, you’ve heard of the WIPO Global Brand Database — usually shortened to GBD. It’s the biggest single trademark search interface in the world, and it’s the data source Trademark Sentinel uses today. This post explains what’s actually in GBD, what isn’t, and why we picked it as the MVP source.

What GBD is

The Global Brand Database is a free public search tool maintained by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It aggregates trademark and appellation-of-origin records from a number of sources into one searchable index. As of writing, it indexes on the order of 60+ million records, covering both international filings and national contributions from participating offices.

Two things are worth pulling apart in that sentence.

International filings are records from registers WIPO itself runs — most notably the Madrid System, the international trademark registration treaty that lets a brand owner file once and designate dozens of member countries. Madrid records flow into GBD natively. So do filings under the Lisbon System (appellations of origin like “Champagne” or “Roquefort”), the Article 6ter list (state emblems and intergovernmental organisation names), and a few smaller WIPO registries.

National contributions are records that participating national offices send to WIPO for inclusion in GBD. Around 70 national offices contribute, including major ones like the United States (USPTO), the United Kingdom (UKIPO), Australia (IP Australia), Canada (CIPO), and many EU member states. The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) contributes its trademark data as well.

The result is the closest thing the world has to a global trademark search. Not the only global search, but the broadest free one.

What GBD does not cover

Equally important — what’s missing.

Not every national office contributes. Several large jurisdictions are absent or only partially represented. China and Japan, in particular, have partial coverage; many smaller offices contribute irregularly or not at all. If your business depends on a specific national office, check whether it’s a GBD contributor before relying on GBD alone.
Update lag varies by source. WIPO’s own registries (Madrid, Lisbon) update with little delay — often within days. National contributions update on whatever cadence the contributing office chooses, which can be weekly, monthly, or quarterly. A “fresh” GBD record for one office may be a week old; for another, several weeks.
No commerce-use data. GBD is a register search, not a market-use search. It tells you what’s been filed; it doesn’t tell you what’s actually being sold under a brand. Use-based research is a separate tool.
No domain or social-handle data. Brand monitoring at large includes domain squats, social-media handle squats, and marketplace listings. None of that is in GBD. It’s a register-level data source, full stop.

The honest summary: GBD is the best single place to start, and you’ll eventually want more sources if your enforcement strategy demands them. We think most teams should start with GBD and add coverage as they hit its limits, rather than starting expensive and broad on day one.

How Trademark Sentinel queries it

At a high level, Trademark Sentinel runs a scheduled search pipeline against GBD: for each watchlist mark, we issue a similarity-aware query against the GBD search interface, normalise the results, deduplicate against records we’ve already seen, score the new ones for similarity, and emit alerts for the matches that cross your threshold.

A few implementation notes that affect what you’ll see as a user, without getting into internals:

Session-bound search. Our queries run inside a managed search session, not as a single one-shot lookup. That keeps result paging consistent between similarity passes and lets us evaluate the same query against the current GBD snapshot end-to-end.
Proof-of-work pacing. GBD is a free public service and we want to keep it that way for everyone. Our query layer paces itself — including a proof-of-work step on each session — so we stay well within fair-use rates no matter how many watchlists are running on our side.
No internal scraping shortcuts. We use the public GBD interface as WIPO publishes it; we don’t try to bypass rate limits or undocumented endpoints. If GBD is down or slow, your alerts arrive when GBD recovers.

If you’re a technical reader interested in the API surface for your own integrations — pulling matches into a case-management system, for example — the API reference has the full schema.

Why GBD is the MVP source

This is a deliberate scope choice. We started Trademark Sentinel with one source for three reasons:

Coverage breadth. Madrid plus 70 national contributions hits more useful registers from one integration than any other single source. For a brand-monitoring product launching today, GBD-only catches the majority of internationally relevant filings on day one.
Operational simplicity. Adapter code for any new register is a real commitment — we have to keep it working as upstream interfaces shift. Shipping one adapter well beats shipping three poorly.
A clear v2 roadmap. Next on the list are direct USPTO and EUIPO adapters (faster updates than GBD’s relayed copies of those offices) and WHOIS-based domain monitoring for teams whose enforcement extends past the registers.

When v2 sources ship, they’ll show up as additional sources you can add to a watchlist alongside GBD.

Practical guidance

Quick fit check against GBD-only coverage:

International enforcement: strong fit. Madrid is excellent, and national contributions catch most of what slips outside Madrid.
Pure-domestic in a market with a v2 adapter on the roadmap (US, EU): workable today, stronger when v2 ships.
Pure-domestic in a non-contributing jurisdiction: not enough on its own — talk to us.

If you want to dig into the source itself, the WIPO Global Brand Database is publicly searchable at branddb.wipo.int. It’s worth ten minutes of exploration, even if you end up using a watch service to do the daily monitoring for you.