USPTO Patent Scraper

What this Actor scrapes

Google Patents runs a public search index over the full USPTO patent corpus — issued patents back to 1976 and published applications from 2001 — but there's no supported API behind it: a React front end, session-shaped pagination, and no documented rate limits. This Actor drives that search endpoint directly, handles pagination safely, and writes one structured row per patent. No account, no key, no quota to manage on your end.

Every request runs through our fingerprint-rotating HTTP stack so Google Patents sees consistent, well-behaved traffic — the kind that keeps your runs off the block-list.

What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi replays real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes. The target sees a real browser, not a Python script.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP whenever the endpoint pushes back.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page; Retry-After headers are honoured.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — we slow down before the API cuts us off, not after.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated fields, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs. Export to JSON, CSV, or Excel straight from Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you pay only when results land in your dataset. No data, no charge (only the small actor-start warm-up fee).

Use cases

• IP-landscape monitoring — schedule weekly runs against a competitor's assignee name and diff the output to catch new filings before they publish in trade press.
• Freedom-to-operate (FTO) research — query by CPC class to surface all patents relevant to a new product before you build.
• Patent assignee scraper workflow — pull a company's full portfolio, pivot by inventor, assignee, or classification, and feed downstream analysis pipelines.
• Inventor tracking — follow a key researcher or prolific inventor across employers and publication windows.
• M&A / acquisition diligence — quantify and categorise a target's patent assets in minutes instead of hours inside expensive IP databases.
• Academic patent-statistics research — feed a corpus of patent abstracts, classification codes, and grant dates into NLP / citation-analysis workflows.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "searchQuery": "TI/(neural network)",
  "maxResults": 3,
  "sortBy": "publication_date_desc",
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

patent_numberpublication_idtitleabstractinventorsassigneesapplicantscpc_classificationsipc_classificationspublication_dategrant_datefiling_datepriority_datekind_codepatent_urlscraped_at

{
  "patent_number": "11,948,025",
  "title": "System and method for training neural networks",
  "abstract": "A method for training a neural network comprising...",
  "inventors": [
    "Jane Smith",
    "John Doe"
  ],
  "assignees": [
    "Example Corp"
  ],
  "cpc_classifications": [
    "G06N 3/08",
    "G06N 20/00"
  ],
  "publication_date": "2024-04-02",
  "grant_date": "2024-04-02",
  "filing_date": "2021-09-15",
  "priority_date": "2021-09-15",
  "kind_code": "B2",
  "patent_url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US11948025B2/en",
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-01T12:00:00Z"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Result ordering is controlled by Google Patents internally; we pass your sortBy preference but the ranking algorithm is theirs.
• Inventor address details (city, state) and full claims text require follow-up document calls and are not included in this Actor. The patent_url field links directly to the full patent document.
• Patent family members (foreign equivalents, continuations) are not surfaced — that cross-reference data requires a separate lookup sequence this Actor doesn't run today.
• Publication cadence — the USPTO typically publishes new grants on Tuesdays; new filings appear in Google Patents' index within approximately one week of publication. This is not a real-time stream.
• Index freshness — this Actor reads Google Patents' index of the USPTO corpus, not USPTO's own systems directly. Google Patents is generally current within the cadence above, but if you need data guaranteed to match USPTO's own record bit-for-bit (e.g. for legal filings), verify against USPTO directly via patent_url.
• Legal disclaimer — this tool retrieves public patent metadata for research purposes. It is not a substitute for professional patent counsel. Always consult a registered patent attorney for FTO opinions, invalidity analysis, or litigation strategy.