Competitor Intelligence

You are a brand protection analyst at a sportswear company. You need to track what your three main competitors, NovaSole Inc., VeloGrip Corp., and TrailEdge Ltd., are filing across the US and EU. When a competitor files a new mark in your core classes (25, 28, and 35), you want to know as soon as it syncs. This guide shows how to build competitor monitoring using the Signa API.

Prerequisites

A Signa API key with trademarks:read scope
Competitor company names or owner IDs

Identify competitor owner records

Start by searching for each competitor’s owner profile. The owner entity in Signa consolidates all filings under one canonical record, even when name variants exist across offices.

# Search for a competitor by name
curl "https://api.signa.so/v1/owners?q=NovaSole&limit=5" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SIGNA_API_KEY"

import Signa from "@signa-so/sdk";

const signa = new Signa({ api_key: process.env.SIGNA_API_KEY });

const competitors = ["NovaSole", "VeloGrip", "TrailEdge"];
const ownerIds: string[] = [];

for (const name of competitors) {
  const results = await signa.owners.list({ q: name, limit: 5 });

  if (results.data.length > 0) {
    const owner = results.data[0];
    ownerIds.push(owner.id);
    console.log(`${name} -> ${owner.id} (${owner.name}, ${owner.trademark_count} marks)`);
  } else {
    console.log(`${name} -> not found`);
  }
}

Expected output:

NovaSole -> own_ns001 (NOVASOLE INC, 87 marks)
VeloGrip -> own_vg002 (VELOGRIP CORP, 142 marks)
TrailEdge -> own_te003 (TRAILEDGE LTD, 53 marks)

If a competitor has subsidiaries or name variants, use the owner detail endpoint to check aliases[] for alternate names the API has resolved. This prevents you from tracking an incomplete picture.

Review each competitor's portfolio profile

Pull the full owner detail to understand each competitor’s filing patterns, top classes, jurisdictions, and preferred attorneys.

curl https://api.signa.so/v1/owners/own_ns001 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SIGNA_API_KEY"

for (const ownerId of ownerIds) {
  const owner = await signa.owners.retrieve(ownerId);

  console.log(`\n=== ${owner.name} ===`);
  console.log(`Total marks: ${owner.stats?.trademark_count}`);
  console.log(`Registered: ${owner.stats?.registered_count}`);
  console.log(`Grant rate: ${((owner.stats?.grant_rate ?? 0) * 100).toFixed(0)}%`);
  console.log(`Jurisdictions: ${owner.stats?.jurisdiction_count}`);
  console.log(`Earliest filing: ${owner.stats?.earliest_filing_date}`);
  console.log(`Latest filing: ${owner.stats?.latest_filing_date}`);
}

Expected output:

{
  "name": "NovaSole Inc.",
  "canonical_name": "NOVASOLE INC",
  "stats": {
    "trademark_count": 87,
    "registered_count": 72,
    "grant_rate": 0.83,
    "jurisdiction_count": 8,
    "earliest_filing_date": "2020-03-04",
    "latest_filing_date": "2026-02-18"
  }
}

For per-class, per-jurisdiction, or per-year breakdowns, list the competitor’s marks with GET /v1/owners/{id}/trademarks (filtered by nice_classes, offices, or filing_date_gte) and aggregate the results client-side. The owner detail response does not carry a pre-broken-down ranked list; the trademark list is the source of truth for that.

List recent filings by competitor

Pull each competitor’s most recent filings to see what brands they are pursuing right now.

# Recent filings from NovaSole in classes 25, 28, 35
curl "https://api.signa.so/v1/owners/own_ns001/trademarks?nice_classes=25,28,35&sort=-filing_date&limit=10" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SIGNA_API_KEY"

for (const ownerId of ownerIds) {
  const filings = await signa.owners.trademarks(ownerId, {
    nice_classes: [25, 28, 35],
    limit: 10,
  });

  console.log(`\nRecent filings for ${ownerId}:`);
  for (const tm of filings.data) {
    console.log(
      `  ${tm.mark_text} | ${tm.office_code} | ${tm.status.stage} | Filed ${tm.filing_date} | Classes ${tm.classifications.map((c) => c.nice_class).join(",")}`,
    );
  }
}

Expected output:

Recent filings for own_ns001:
  NOVASOLE APEX   | US | examining | Filed 2026-02-28 | Classes 25,28
  NOVASOLE STRIDE | EM | filed     | Filed 2026-01-15 | Classes 25,35
  NOVA TRACTION   | EM | examining | Filed 2025-11-20 | Classes 28

Aggregate filing trends over time

Use search with aggregations_only to get filing volume trends without downloading individual records. This is useful for quarterly competitive reports.

# Get filing volume breakdown for a competitor in the last 3 years
curl -X POST https://api.signa.so/v1/trademarks \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SIGNA_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "filters": {
      "owner_id": "own_ns001",
      "filing_date": { "gte": "2024-01-01" }
    },
    "options": {
      "aggregations": ["filing_year", "nice_classes", "office_code", "mark_feature_type"],
      "aggregations_only": true
    }
  }'

const trends = await signa.trademarks.search({
  filters: {
    owner_id: "own_ns001",
    filing_date: { gte: "2024-01-01" },
  },
  options: {
    aggregations: ["filing_year", "nice_classes", "office_code", "mark_feature_type"],
    aggregations_only: true,
  },
});

console.log("Filing volume by year:", trends.aggregations?.filing_year);
console.log("Class distribution:", trends.aggregations?.nice_classes);
console.log("Offices:", trends.aggregations?.office_code);
console.log("Mark types:", trends.aggregations?.mark_feature_type);

Expected output:

{
  "aggregations": {
    "filing_year": { "2024": 12, "2025": 18, "2026": 7 },
    "nice_classes": { "25": 18, "28": 12, "35": 7 },
    "office_code": { "US": 20, "EM": 12, "GB": 5 },
    "mark_feature_type": { "word": 28, "figurative": 7, "combined": 2 }
  }
}

A sudden increase in figurative marks might indicate a competitor is developing new logos or brand identities, often a sign of upcoming product launches. Word mark filings in new jurisdictions suggest geographic expansion plans.

Monitoring competitors going forward

The steps above are a good one-time or quarterly audit. For ongoing monitoring, create an owner watch for each competitor owner ID and register a webhook: Signa evaluates the watch against every data update and pushes an alert the moment a tracked competitor files, so you are not re-running searches to find out. If you want to pull results yourself instead, rerun the owner-trademarks query on your own schedule and diff the result against the previous run:

async function fetchCompetitorFilings(ownerIds: string[], sinceIso: string) {
  const fresh: any[] = [];
  for (const ownerId of ownerIds) {
    const page = await signa.owners.trademarks(ownerId, {
      filing_date_gte: sinceIso,
      limit: 100,
    });
    fresh.push(...page.data);
  }
  return fresh;
}

const lastRun = "2026-03-17T00:00:00Z"; // persist between runs
const filings = await fetchCompetitorFilings(ownerIds, lastRun);

console.log(`${filings.length} new filings since ${lastRun}`);

To catch brand-new entrants you are not yet tracking, run a class-filtered search over the same window and exclude the owners you already know about:

const classFilings = await signa.trademarks.search({
  filters: {
    nice_classes: [25, 28],
    offices: ["US", "EM"],
    filing_date: { gte: lastRun },
  },
  limit: 100,
  sort: "-filing_date",
});

const knownOwners = new Set(ownerIds);
const newcomers = classFilings.data.filter((tm) => !knownOwners.has(tm.owners?.[0]?.id ?? ""));

console.log(`${newcomers.length} filings from owners not yet in your tracker`);

Building a competitive dashboard

Combine the above queries into a periodic report that tracks:

Metric	Source
New filings per competitor	`GET /v1/owners/{id}/trademarks?filing_date_gte=...`
Class distribution shifts	`POST /v1/trademarks` with `options.aggregations_only`
New jurisdictions entered	Owner detail `stats.jurisdiction_count` compared run over run
Opposition activity	`GET /v1/proceedings?q=<competitor name>&party_role=opponent`
Newly abandoned marks	`GET /v1/owners/{id}/trademarks?status_primary=inactive&filing_date_gte=...`

For a competitor you track by ID, GET /v1/proceedings?party_entity_id=<ent_…>&party_role=opponent returns the proceedings where a member owner of the entity is the opponent. It matches only parties Signa has linked to an owner, so parties without a link (most Canadian and Australian opponents, as they are matched only against the owner of the mark under challenge, and names that match only without a company suffix) are missing. For complete coverage, also search by name: q matches a case-insensitive substring of the name the office recorded, and with party_role that same party must hold the role. It does not add a competitor’s subsidiaries or former names, so query each name you track and deduplicate by id.

What’s next

Trademark Clearance

Run a clearance search against your competitors’ marks before launching a new brand.

Opposition Tracking

Monitor TTAB proceedings where your competitors are involved as parties.

M&A Due Diligence

Evaluate a competitor’s full IP portfolio if an acquisition is on the table.

Getting started

Core concepts

Build with AI

Data

Monitoring

Working with the API

Use cases

Competitor Intelligence

Prerequisites

Monitoring competitors going forward

Building a competitive dashboard

What’s next

Trademark Clearance

Opposition Tracking

M&A Due Diligence

​Prerequisites

​Monitoring competitors going forward

​Building a competitive dashboard

​What’s next

Trademark Clearance

Opposition Tracking

M&A Due Diligence

Prerequisites

Monitoring competitors going forward

Building a competitive dashboard

What’s next