About

Patent data, made legible.

PatentIndex is a free tool for searching and understanding patents. It is an independent project built on public patent data — no login required, no paywall on search.

What it is

The full text of every granted patent and published application is public — but it is scattered, inconsistently formatted, and hard to navigate. PatentIndex pulls that public record into one fast, readable place and adds a layer of analytics on top of it:

  • Free full-text searchacross roughly 12.5 million patents and applications — by keyword, assignee, inventor, and CPC technology area.
  • The PatentIndex Scorea 1–99 estimate of a patent's significance, ranked within its own technology area and filing era.
  • Inventor & assignee analyticsportfolios, output over time, and CPC leaderboards of the most significant work in each field.
  • Claims & expiry datathe exact claim text as granted, plus an estimated expiry date for each patent.

Why it exists

Good information about patents has mostly lived behind expensive enterprise subscriptions. The underlying data, though, belongs to the public. The goal here is simple: make the public patent record genuinely usable — for researchers, engineers, founders, and anyone curious about who invented what — without a price tag on looking.

How the numbers work

Every figure on the site is a statistical estimate computed from bulk data — never a legal judgment. Scores, status labels, and expiry dates are not opinions on validity, enforceability, or infringement, and are no substitute for a patent attorney or the official USPTO record. The methodology page explains exactly what feeds the score and, just as important, what it does not claim to know.

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