Patent Landscape Tracker: Who Is Patenting What

Search a technology and see which companies are filing patents in it, and who is accelerating. Or name your competitors and get their filing history year by year.

No API key, no login, no proxy.

What does this do?

A list of patents is not an answer to anything. The question people actually have is who is investing in this area, and is anyone moving? — and that needs the patents grouped by company, counted by the right date, and compared across years.

flowchart LR
    A[Technology search<br/>or company names] --> B[Google Patents]
    B --> C[Group by company]
    B --> D[Exact filings per year]
    C & D --> E[Ranked: who files here,<br/>and who is accelerating]

Who is it for?

You are	You use it to
R&D or product strategy	See who else is working in your area before committing a roadmap
Competitive intelligence	Watch a rival's filing rate rise or fall, years before products ship
An investor or scout	Spot a company quietly building a position in a technology
An IP attorney or analyst	Get a landscape in one run instead of a week of searching
A journalist	Back a story about a company's direction with its own filings

What data do you get?

One row per company:

Field	What it is
assignee	The company, with its separate legal entities folded together
totalMatchingFiled	How many patents match in total, as Google counts them
patentsRead	How many were actually read for the detail below
trend, whyTrend	Accelerating, growing, steady, slowing, withdrawing, or new entrant — with the numbers behind it
filingsByPriorityYear	Filings per year
filingsCountedExactly	Whether those year counts are exact or from the sample
firstPriorityYear, latestPriorityYear	When they started and last filed
internationalSharePercent	How much they file abroad, which is what companies do with work they are serious about
grantedSharePercent	How much has actually granted
topInventors	Who is named on the filings
officeSpread	Which patent offices they use
recentPatents	Their five newest filings, with links

Switch What to output to get one row per patent instead, with numbers, titles, dates and PDF links.

Example: solid state batteries, filings since 2015

Company	Filings	Trend	Why
CATL (宁德时代)	45 in sample	accelerating	40 filings in 2022-24 against 5 in 2019-21 — 8x
GM Global Technology Operations	15	withdrawing	0 in 2022-24 against 10 in 2019-21
LG Energy Solution	3	too few to tell	Filings fall outside the comparison window

CATL filing eight times faster while GM stopped is the entire story of that category in one table, and neither fact appears anywhere on a patent listing.

Example: named companies, exact counts

Naming the companies changes the quality of the answer. These are complete counts, not a sample:

Company	Patents matching	Trend	Filings 2022-24 vs 2019-21
BYD	110,265	growing	47,868 against 28,210 — 1.7x
Tesla	8,323	steady	781 against 664 — 1.2x

Worth noting what changed: reading a 50-patent sample for Tesla suggested it was withdrawing, because Google's relevance ranking happened to return older filings. The exact yearly counts show it is steady. That is the difference between counting what you were shown and counting what is there.

How the numbers are made, and what they are not

• Counted by priority date, not publication date. A patent publishes about 18 months after it is filed. Counting by publication tells you what companies were doing two years ago and labels it today.
• The last two years are always undercounted, for the same reason, and every row says so. A naive reading of recent years looks like a collapse at every company simultaneously; it is just the publication lag.
• Named companies get exact yearly counts. When you name a company, each year is counted from the number of matches for that year, not by reading a sample. This matters: a 50-patent sample for Tesla came back spanning 2015-2020 and made a live company look like it had stopped filing — that was Google's relevance ranking, not Tesla.
• A technology search reads the highest-ranked matches, so its counts are of what was read, not of everything that exists. The row says which kind of count you are looking at.
• Company names are merged carefully, and imperfectly. Legal suffixes and regional arms are folded together, and when you name a company its separate entities are grouped under the name you asked for. A company filing under both an English and a local-language name may still appear twice; that limit is stated on every row rather than hidden.
• It stops when Google says stop, and this is the real limit of the Actor. The endpoint refuses a server that asks too often, and the refusal lasts longer than a run does — during development, repeated test runs got the server refused for several minutes at a time. Requests are paced well under the threshold and a refusal makes everything stand down, but back-to-back runs will hit it. When that happens the Actor says plainly that it was refused rather than reporting an empty result as "nothing matched". Leave a few minutes between large runs, or schedule them rather than firing them by hand.

Popular patent reports

Ready-made runs you can open and start, or copy as a starting point:

• Patent Landscape for a Technology
• Competitor Patent Tracking
• AI and Machine Learning Patent Landscape
• Battery Technology Patent Landscape
• Semiconductor Patent Landscape
• Biotech and Pharma Patent Landscape
• Quantum Computing Patent Landscape
• Robotics and Automation Patent Landscape
• EV and Charging Patent Landscape
• Medical Device Patent Landscape
• Who Is Patenting AI Chips
• US Patent Filings by Company
• Chinese Patent Filings by Company
• Granted Patents Only, by Company
• Patent List Export

Pricing

$0.003 per page of patents read (10 patents a page, and one page per year when counting a named company's history) and $0.01 per company report.

A technology landscape reading 200 patents costs about $0.06 plus $0.01 per company found. Tracking three named companies over ten years costs about $0.15.

Input

Setting	What it does
Technology to search for	The area, for example "solid state battery" or "mRNA vaccine"
Companies to track	Optional. Named companies get exact yearly counts; combine with a technology to see one company in one field
Earliest priority year	How far back to count
Patent office	Optional. Limit to US, EP, WO, CN, JP and others
Granted patents only	Off by default: pending applications are the better signal of current activity
Maximum patents to read	More detail, more cost
What to output	One row per company with the trend, or one row per patent
Minimum patents per company	Keeps one-off filers out of the table

Integrations

Runs on a schedule and connects to Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier, Make or your own code through the Apify API. A quarterly run over the same technology turns these snapshots into an early warning that a competitor has started filing.