PCT Newsletter

July-August 2026 | No. 07-08/2026

PATENTSCOPE expands SEP data coverage

And tool also now offers AI-assisted search

WIPO has enhanced its global patent database, PATENTSCOPE, by expanding the data on standard essential patents (SEPs) and enabling AI-assisted searches.

Since 2025, users have been able to search for “declared” SEPs – filings for patents that the holder believes are essential to a particular standard. Earlier this year, pool-verified SEP search was added to find patents that have been objectively verified as SEPs by independent experts on behalf of patent pool administrator Sisvel.

Now, Via Licensing Alliance has become the second patent pool administrator to provide verified essentiality data, meaning that more than 9,000 patent applications are searchable as pool-verified SEPs.

Coverage of declared patents has also increased significantly. Data on declared SEPs from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has been expanded: PATENTSCOPE now displays not only patents explicitly declared to ETSI as standard essential, but also related patent family members added by ETSI through its Family Extension.

This enhancement increases the number of distinct patent records available through the PATENTSCOPE SEP collection – which covers ETSI, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) – from over 206,000 to more than 450,000.

Users can learn more about SEPs in PATENTSCOPE during two upcoming webinars, on 1 September and 3 September 2026.

In addition, users can now harness the power of AI to help build effective PATENTSCOPE search queries. Simply describe what you are looking for in natural language and an AI assistant will translate it into a structured search request.

The language model is hosted on WIPO premises so your search queries are kept confidential, and search capabilities will be further enhanced in due course.

For more information, visit the WIPO website.

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