Is TESS still available?

No. The USPTO's legacy Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) has been retired in favor of a new Trademark Search tool at tmsearch.uspto.gov. The USPTO published a transition guide for users moving from TESS to the new system. Bookmarks and instructions that reference the old TESS interface no longer point to a working search tool.

Where do I search for trademarks now?

At tmsearch.uspto.gov, the USPTO's current Trademark Search system. It searches the same underlying USPTO trademark records TESS used to search, filed applications, registrations, and their status, just through a rebuilt interface.

No, TSDR (Trademark Status and Document Retrieval), the tool for pulling up the status and official documents of a specific application or registration by serial or registration number, is unaffected and remains the correct tool for checking a known mark's status, separate from Trademark Search which is for discovering marks you do not already have a number for.

TESS Is Retired: What Replaced the USPTO's Old Trademark Search Tool

Short answer: TESS (Trademark Electronic Search System), the USPTO's search tool for years, has been retired. The USPTO now directs users to a new Trademark Search system at tmsearch.uspto.gov, and has published a "Transitioning from TESS" guide for users who bookmarked or scripted against the old interface. If you have instructions, a blog post, or your own internal documentation that tells you to search TESS, that link no longer leads anywhere useful, use the new Trademark Search tool instead. TSDR, the separate tool for checking a specific application or registration's status, is unaffected.

What actually changed

The underlying data has not changed, every application and registration TESS used to index is still searchable, USPTO trademark records did not go anywhere. What changed is the interface and search tooling: the new Trademark Search system at tmsearch.uspto.gov replaced TESS's older search technology. On its current trademark search page, the USPTO explicitly frames this as a transition, with reference material to help users move from the old system to the new one.

If you are watching new filings manually, this matters practically: any saved search, script, or documented process built against the old TESS URL structure will need to be rebuilt against the new tool.

TESS vs the new Trademark Search: what's the same, what's different

	TESS (retired)	Trademark Search (current, tmsearch.uspto.gov)
Status	Retired	Active
Data source	USPTO trademark records	Same USPTO trademark records
URL	Legacy tess2.uspto.gov paths, no longer functional	tmsearch.uspto.gov
Search by	Wordmark, serial number, owner	Same core search fields, rebuilt interface
Coverage	Filed applications and registrations	Same coverage

TSDR is a different tool, and it is unaffected

It is worth being precise here because the two tools do different jobs and get conflated constantly:

Trademark Search (formerly TESS) is for discovery: you do not yet know if a mark you are considering, or a mark similar to yours, has been filed. You search by wordmark or owner name to find out.
TSDR (Trademark Status and Document Retrieval), at tsdr.uspto.gov, is for lookup: you already have a serial number or registration number, and you want the current status, prosecution history, and official documents for that specific case.

The TESS retirement affects the first tool only. TSDR's search-by-number function and document retrieval are unchanged.

Why this matters if you are monitoring new filings yourself

If your DIY trademark-watching process involves periodic manual searches, the retirement of TESS is exactly the kind of quiet infrastructure change that breaks a workflow nobody is checking regularly. A monthly manual search habit built around a bookmark to the old tool will silently stop working, and unlike a broken link on a random website, there is no error message telling you your trademark watch has gone dark, you simply stop finding new filings because you are searching the wrong (or a dead) tool.

This is one of the structural risks of manual monitoring versus an automated pipeline that reads the USPTO's underlying daily filing data directly rather than depending on a specific search UI staying in the same place.

Legal disclaimer

This post is informational only and is not legal advice. USPTO tools and URLs change; verify current search tools directly at uspto.gov before relying on any link, including the ones in this post.