📋 USPTO Patent Search — Claims, Prior Art & Citations

Search US patents and pull back everything you need for real IP research — not just titles and snippets, but the full abstract, complete claims text, CPC classifications, backward citations (prior art), forward citations (cited-by), and patent family size. Built for patent attorneys, R&D teams, competitive-intelligence analysts, and anyone doing freedom-to-operate or prior-art work.

By default this actor searches the USPTO (US patents). Point it at any other office (EP, CN, JP, WO…) with the country field, or set it to worldwide.

What it extracts

For every matching patent you get:

• Identity — publication number, title, full abstract
• Claims — the complete claims text and the claim count
• Classifications — CPC codes
• Prior art — the list of backward citations (patents this one cites) and the count
• Impact — cited-by count (how many later patents cite it)
• Family — patent family size (worldwide applications)
• People & dates — assignee/owner, inventor, priority / filing / grant / publication dates
• Links — Google Patents URL and PDF

Features

• Defaults to US patents — no more accidental foreign results
• Full claims + prior-art citations on every record (toggle off for fast summary-only runs)
• Filter by assignee, inventor, country, status (grant/application), and priority date range
• CPC classification codes for landscape and clustering work
• Structured JSON output with a defined schema

Input example

{
  "query": "solid state battery",
  "assignee": "Toyota",
  "after": "2020-01-01",
  "fetchDetails": true,
  "maxResults": 50
}

Output example

{
  "publication_number": "US10862092B2",
  "title": "Secondary battery with separator having monolayer...",
  "abstract": "According to one embodiment, a separator is provided...",
  "claims_count": 16,
  "claims_text": "1. A secondary battery comprising: a positive electrode...",
  "cpc_classifications": ["H01M10/24", "H01M10/42", "H01M2/1646"],
  "cited_patents_count": 30,
  "cited_patents": ["US6403253B1", "US5798189A", "JP2000077073A"],
  "cited_by_count": 1,
  "family_size": 4,
  "assignee": "Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba",
  "inventor": "…",
  "priority_date": "2018-03-22",
  "grant_date": "2020-12-08",
  "google_patents_url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US10862092B2/en"
}

Use cases

• Prior-art & FTO searches — pull claims and backward citations for a technology area
• Competitive IP intelligence — track a competitor's grants by assignee, with claim scope
• Patent-landscape analysis — cluster results by CPC class and citation counts
• R&D and licensing — surface high-impact patents (high cited-by) and their families
• Feeding LLM/RAG pipelines — structured claims + abstracts ready for downstream analysis

How to use

Run it from the Apify Console (enter a query, optionally an assignee or date range, click Start), call it on demand via the Apify API or client SDKs, or put it on a schedule to watch a competitor or technology area. Output is a standard dataset you can export to JSON/CSV/Excel or pipe into the tools you already use on Apify.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: a small per-run start fee plus a per-patent fee for each record returned — you only pay for the patents you actually pull. Lower maxResults (or turn off fetchDetails) to control cost.

FAQ

Does it really return US patents? Yes — it defaults to the US office. Use the country field for EP, CN, JP, WO, or empty for worldwide. Where do claims and citations come from? Each patent's detail page is fetched and parsed when fetchDetails is on (the default). Why is fetchDetails optional? Fetching full details adds time per result; turn it off when you only need titles, abstracts, assignees, and dates. How fresh is the data? Pulled live on each run. What format is the output? Structured JSON dataset items with a defined schema (export to CSV/JSON/Excel). Can I search by company or inventor? Yes — use the assignee and inventor filters.

Related patent & trademark search actors

Working across jurisdictions? Pair this with the rest of the IP suite:

• EUIPO Trademark Search — EU trademarks (TMview & eSearch)
• CNIPA China Patent Search — Chinese patents, bilingual, with claims & citations
• WIPO PATENTSCOPE Search — international (PCT) patents
• Trademark Search — USPTO — US trademark lookup
• Japan J-PlatPat · Korea KIPRIS · Hong Kong Trademarks
• Patents & Trademarks (IP) MCP — patent search built for AI agents