How to Conduct a Kentucky Business Search

You can search by:

• Business name or organization number
• City name of principal office
• ZIP code of principal office

From the results, you can find out more information about the listed businesses. Such as:

• Organization number
• Profit or non-profit designation
• Standing
• Organization date
• Principal office address

If the business name you’re interested in is being used by an inactive business (one listed in red) you can call the Kentucky Secretary of State to find out if it would be available for use.

If you receive no results or none of the names are similar to the one you want to use, then your business name is likely available to use and you can proceed to the next step.

Step 3: Refine your search for accuracy

To ensure the accuracy of your search, you’ll want to run a few different searches with permutations of the business name you want to use.

If you’ve found the whole name to be unique, you should now limit your search to just the keywords in your business name. Searching the most unique words will show you if there are any businesses already using a similar enough name to not pass distinguishability.

A few other search tips:

• You don’t need to include business entity designations, such as LLC or Corporation, as the search will return all types of companies.
• There’s no need to include punctuation such as commas, periods, and apostrophes.
• Searches are not case-sensitive, so you don’t need to worry about uppercase and lowercase letters.

If you have any trouble with your search or want to be certain that you’ve done it adequately, you can call the Kentucky Secretary of State and they can check for you. Their phone number is (502) 564-3490. 

Step 4: Check if your domain name and social media handles are available

Once you’ve found a business name that seems available and that you like, you’ll next want to make sure that you’ll be able to get a website url and the social media handles you want to go with that business name.

You can search for your potential domain name on a domain host website like Squarespace or GoDaddy to see if it’s available. To search for social media handles, you’ll check each individual social media site to see if it’s already in use or not.

Step 5: Perform a trademark search

The Kentucky business name search tool assesses whether or not a business name is already in use in the state of Kentucky.

If you’re interested in taking your business across state lines or operating nationally, you might also want to file for federal trademark protection.

Before registering your business name, you can perform a trademark search to see if the name is already in use somewhere else in the U.S.