check-name

name	check-name
description	Check whether a candidate company name is available across USPTO trademarks, WA Secretary of State, and major domain TLDs. Use when the user asks to check, verify, clear, or sweep a name for an LLC, corp, brand, trademark, or domain — anything that needs to be unique before filing.

Check Name Availability

Run an aggregated availability sweep on a candidate company name across three sources and produce a single markdown report. The report drives a real filing decision — accuracy over speed.

When to invoke

The user asks any of:

• "Is <name> available?"
• "Can I file <name> as an LLC?"
• "Check trademark on <name>"
• "Is <name>.com taken?"
• "Run availability checks on <name>"
• "Clear <name> for me"

Arguments

Parse from $ARGUMENTS:

• Candidate name (positional, required) — the bare candidate. Can be one or more words. Quote if it contains spaces.
• --systems <csv> (optional) — subset of uspto,wa-sos,domain. Default: all three.
• --class <csv> (optional) — USPTO class filter, e.g. 35,42. Default: pick from business context (see below).
• --json (optional) — emit machine-readable JSON instead of markdown.
• --refresh (optional) — bypass cache.

If the candidate name is missing or ambiguous, ask the user before invoking.

Picking USPTO classes (do this before running)

The user usually doesn't know Nice Classification — pick the classes for them, announce, run.

Procedure:

1. If --class was explicitly provided, use it verbatim. No question.
2. Otherwise, infer the business archetype. Check the recent conversation for cues:
   • "fractional CTO firm", "tech consulting", "advisory" → IT consulting archetype
   • "SaaS", "platform", "app" → SaaS archetype
   • "store", "DTC", "brand" → e-commerce archetype
   • "restaurant", "café", "bar" → food service archetype
   • "coaching", "training", "course" → education archetype
   • (etc.)
3. Look up the matching class set in ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/playbooks/uspto-nice-classes.md (the "Business archetype → class map" table is the lookup).
4. Announce the choice in ONE LINE before running. Example:

   Searching USPTO classes 35 (business consulting) and 42 (IT consulting) — standard for a fractional CTO firm. Override with /check-name <name> --class X,Y if you want different scope.

5. If you can't infer the archetype from context AND the user hasn't told you, ask ONCE with AskUserQuestion. The options should be drawn from the archetype map. Don't dump the full 45-class taxonomy — give 4 archetypes max plus "Other (describe)".
6. Run with the picked --class.

After the run, if the verdict is crowded or blocked:

• If a class is the source of the block, mention the "Strategic-narrowing tactics" from uspto-nice-classes.md — sometimes filing in just one of the two classes with a narrowed goods/services description is a workaround.
• Re-run with the narrower class set if the user wants to explore that path.

Prerequisites

This skill delegates all browser interactions to gstack browse — a single shared browser daemon that handles Cloudflare Turnstile, stealth, and headed/headless mode. No npm install is required.

Verify gstack is installed:

ls "$HOME/.claude/skills/gstack/browse/dist/browse" && echo READY || echo MISSING

If MISSING, tell the user: "This skill requires gstack to be installed. Install it from https://github.com/garryslist/gstack and run its setup." STOP.

Run

cd "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts"
node cli.mjs "<candidate-name>" [flags...]

The CLI writes:

• stdout: the markdown report (or JSON if --json)
• stderr: progress notes (one line per source)

Show the stdout report verbatim to the user.

Interpreting the result

The report ends with an Overall verdict line — one of:

Verdict	What to recommend
available	Encourage the user to file. Flag any caveats from the per-source notes.
crowded	Show the table and the specific collisions. Ask the user whether they want to proceed despite the noise or try alternates.
blocked	Recommend dropping this candidate. Show the blocking entry. Offer to run the same check on alternates.
inconclusive	Some source returned a block (e.g., WAF). Explain which one and what manual step would resolve it. Do NOT treat as available.

Headed-mode requirement

The WA SoS check launches a visible Chromium window during its run because Cloudflare Turnstile won't auto-resolve in headless mode. This is by design — the script returns silent false negatives without it. If the user objects to the visible window, suggest running --systems uspto,domain only.

When the script fails

If a source returns status: error, read the matching playbook in ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/playbooks/<source>.md and re-derive the working procedure by hand. The playbook documents element semantics, gotchas, and the Angular scope keys / API response shapes. Once the manual procedure works again, patch the script in ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/sources/<source>.mjs and bump its LAST_VERIFIED constant.

Output paper trail

If the user is doing this for a real filing decision (not casual exploration), offer to save the report to internal/research/name-checks/<slug>-<YYYY-MM-DD>.md in the current project for later reference.