The registered trademark symbol is the ®, a capital R inside a circle. It shows that the sign has been registered with a trade mark office (in the UK the Intellectual Property Office, for the European Union the EUIPO, internationally WIPO), and it can only be used once the mark is registered, not when the application is filed. UK law spells it trade mark, as two words; the symbol's name is usually written as one.
In the UK "registered trademark symbol" is searched about 2,400 times a month, and "trademark symbol" 22,200 (12-month averages, Google Ads data extracted with DataForSEO, October 2026). On 10 October 2026 the first page answered the legal and typing questions well: an AI Overview citing section 95 of the Trade Marks Act 1994, Trademarkia's guide to typing the symbol, Wikimedia Commons and a string of image libraries. None of these results tackles the question that lands on whoever runs a website: does the symbol belong in the title tag, in product pages, in ads? And does Google read it? To answer, we checked 10 Italian SERPs for registered brands, repeated the searches with and without ®, and then ran a shorter check on Google UK.
®, ™ and ©: what each symbol means
The three symbols are often confused, but they protect different things. The ® and the ™ concern trade marks, the © concerns copyright in a work.
| Symbol | Name | What it signals | When to use it in the UK |
|---|---|---|---|
| ® | Registered | Registered trade mark | Only after registration with the UK IPO, or an international registration through WIPO that covers the UK |
| ™ | Trademark | Trade mark claimed, registered or not | Also while the application is pending, or for a mark used without registration |
| © | Copyright | Work protected by copyright | Text, photos, software. It doesn't apply to trade marks |
| ℠ | Service mark | Mark for services | Born in US practice, it has no specific role in the UK |
The ™ has no legal value of its own: it warns that someone considers the sign their trade mark, and in the UK an unregistered mark can only be defended through the common law of passing off. GOV.UK sums up the registered side in one line: once your trade mark is registered you can "put the ® symbol next to your brand". Nothing obliges you to use it on a registered mark; using it on a mark that isn't registered is the offence.
When you can use the ® (and what you risk)
There is only one rule: the ® goes on when the mark is registered. A filed application isn't enough. Once registered, a UK trade mark lasts ten years and can be renewed for further ten-year periods, under section 42 of the Trade Marks Act 1994; section 40(3) treats the filing date as the date of registration, so the ten years run from when you applied.
Using it earlier is a criminal offence, not just an administrative one. Section 95 of the same Act punishes anyone who falsely represents that a mark is registered "knowing or having reason to believe that the representation is false". It treats the word "registered", or any other word or symbol implying registration, used in the UK, as a claim to UK registration. The penalty is a fine up to level 3 on the standard scale, which is £1,000 in England and Wales.
There are two points legal guides tend to take for granted. First: the ® only applies in the countries where the mark is registered. Section 95 makes an exception only where the reference is to a registration elsewhere and the mark really is registered there, so an Italian or US brand sold in the UK without a UK registration shouldn't carry the ® on pages aimed at the British market. Since 1 January 2021 a new EU trade mark no longer covers the UK. INTA, the international association of trade mark owners, points out that in several jurisdictions misuse is a civil or criminal offence. Second: whether a given web page, ad or product listing counts as a false representation depends on the facts. A chartered trade mark attorney can tell you, because this is where an SEO specialist's expertise ends.
How to type the ® symbol on a keyboard, a Mac and in HTML
The character is the same everywhere; only the way you insert it changes.
| Symbol | Windows (numeric keypad) | HTML entity | Unicode code point |
|---|---|---|---|
| ® | Alt + 0174 | ® | U+00AE |
| ™ | Alt + 0153 | ™ | U+2122 |
| © | Alt + 0169 | © | U+00A9 |
On a Mac with a British or US keyboard layout, Option + R gives the ®; the method that works with any layout is the Character Viewer, which opens with Ctrl + Cmd + Space, where you search for "registered". On a smartphone the quickest way is to copy the character from a page like this one. Be careful not to paste the emoji variant (®️), which some systems show in colour and larger: in body text and in the title, use the plain character.
In WordPress, and in modern CMSs generally, you can type the symbol straight into the page title or the Yoast SEO title: pages are in UTF-8 and the HTML entity isn't needed. It only becomes useful if you're writing HTML by hand. One possible error is double escaping: the system turns ® into ® and the SERP shows the text "®" instead of the symbol. You can spot it at once by searching for the page on Google or with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console.
Does the ® in the title tag help SEO?
No, not directly. Google's documentation on title links doesn't mention trade mark symbols. It asks for descriptive, concise titles, without repeated words, with the site name at the start or end separated by a hyphen, a colon or a pipe. These are the same rules you'll find in our guide to the meta title and, more broadly, in on-page SEO.
The practical point is another one: the title you write often isn't the one Google shows. Three studies have measured how often this happens. None states a UK sample, so read them as an order of magnitude.
| Study | Year | Sample | Titles rewritten by Google |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs (Michal Pecánek) | 2021 | 953,276 pages in the top 10 | 33.4% |
| Zyppy (Cyrus Shepard) | 2022 | 80,959 URLs from 2,370 sites | 61.6% |
| Search Engine Land (John McAlpin) | 2025 | About 30,000 seed keywords, top 20 | 76% |
The direction is clear, though, and rising. In the Ahrefs study, titles wider than 600 pixels were 57% more likely to be rewritten. In Zyppy's, Google removed or replaced the pipe in 41% of cases and the hyphen in 19.7%. A symbol on its own doesn't make a title much longer, but a title already at the limit that drags along "Brand® Product® | Brand®" has a good chance of being cut or rewritten, and with the rewrite the ® disappears. We've collected the most common causes in why Google ignores your meta title.
The test: 10 Italian brands on Google, how many titles show the ®
Overnight between 4 and 5 October 2026 we used DataForSEO to extract the first page of Google Italy, desktop version, for ten heavily searched registered brands: Nutella, LEGO, Vespa Piaggio, Bialetti Moka Express, Post-it, Barilla, Ferrero Rocher, Lavazza, Tic Tac and Kinder Bueno. We counted only organic results, excluding the AI Overview, the "People also ask" box and images. On 10 October 2026 we ran a shorter version on Google UK, desktop, with four brands: LEGO, Nutella, Post-it and Marmite.
| Query | Organic results | Titles with ® or ™ | Official site among organic results |
|---|---|---|---|
| nutella | 10 | 1 | Yes, position 3 |
| lego | 2 | 1 | Yes, position 1 |
| vespa piaggio | 9 | 0 | No |
| bialetti moka express | 8 | 0 | No |
| post-it | 9 | 2 | No (only 3M Bolivia) |
| barilla | 8 | 0 | Only a PDF on barillagroup.com |
| ferrero rocher | 11 | 0 | Only the Facebook page |
| lavazza | 5 | 0 | Yes, two business pages |
| tic tac | 12 | 0 | Only the YouTube channel |
| kinder bueno | 9 | 0 | Yes, position 1 |
| Total | 83 | 4 (4.8%) |
Of 83 titles, 4 contain the symbol. Two belong to the brand owners: "Home | LEGO® Shop ufficiale IT" (official LEGO® shop, Italy) on lego.com and "Deliziose con Nutella® | Ricette" (Delicious with Nutella®, recipes) on nutella.com. The other two belong to a US reseller of promotional merchandise, which writes "Post-it ®" with a space before the symbol on one page and "Post-it(R)" in plain characters on the other. Kinder and Lavazza, present with their own sites, don't use the ® in the title. No title contained the ™. Google UK gave a similar picture: 3 titles out of 31 had the ®. One is the owner's ("Home | Official LEGO® Shop GB", first for "lego"); the other two are stationery retailers on "post-it", Viking Direct and ESPO. For "nutella" the official site wasn't among the organic results at all, and for "marmite" marmite.co.uk appeared with a nutrition page whose title carries no symbol.
With and without ® in the search
In the second part we searched five brands with and without the symbol ("nutella" and "nutella®", and so on). We repeated everything two minutes later, to separate the effect of the ® from the normal fluctuations of the SERP.
| Brand | Run 1 and run 2 without ®: URLs in common | Run 2, without and with ®: URLs in common | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| nutella | 0 of 8 | 7 of 7 | The SERP fluctuates, the ® doesn't count |
| lego | 2 of 2 | 2 of 2 | Identical |
| post-it | 0 of 7 | 0 of 7 | Two versions of the SERP served alternately |
| barilla | 7 of 8 | 6 of 8 | Minimal differences |
| lavazza | 5 of 5 | 0 of 5 | Effect repeated in both runs |
The first run alone would have led us astray. For "post-it®" the 3M Italy site appeared, missing for "post-it": it looked as if the symbol changed everything. On the second round the two SERPs had swapped. It was noise. Google UK did exactly the same on 10 October 2026: in the first run "post-it®" put 3M's UK page "Post-it® Brand | 3M UK" in first place, absent for "post-it"; in the second run it had gone. Between the two runs without the symbol, only 5 of 9 URLs were the same; in the second run, with and without ®, 7 of 9 were.
The only brand where the ® changed results repeatably in Italy was Lavazza: with the symbol, the lavazza.it homepage rose to first place, and its title ("Lavazza Caffè Espresso Italiano dal 1895", Italian espresso since 1895) doesn't have the ®. On Barilla, in both runs, the AI Overview read "barilla®" as Barillà, the surname of the footballer Antonino Barillà. In the UK "marmite®" returned the same AI Overview as "marmite" and 6 of the same 7 organic URLs.
What this tells us. In most cases Google treats the ® as a negligible character, and when the query does change the results it doesn't reward pages with the symbol in the title. Adding the ® to catch people who type it, as you would with keyword variants, has no basis: it's closer to keyword stuffing than to optimisation. The sample is small (ten brands in Italy and four in the UK, one date each, desktop only) and is there to dismantle a common idea, not to set a rule.
When it makes sense to put the ® in the title (and when it doesn't)
It makes sense on the owner's site, on the home page or the page of the flagship product. That's LEGO's choice, in both Italy and the UK: in a SERP that also includes resellers, the symbol next to "Official" tells the reader which shop belongs to the brand. For a much-imitated brand it's a trust signal that costs nothing, as long as the title stays readable.
It isn't needed on the product pages of retailers selling other people's brands. "Bialetti® Moka Express® 3 Cup" is longer than "Bialetti Moka Express 3 Cup" and adds nothing: the searcher wants the model and the size. On product pages what counts is the exact model name, as we explain in the guide to ecommerce SEO.
It should never be used on a mark that has only been applied for. There, if you want to signal the claim, there's the ™.
Once per page is enough. INTA recommends the symbol mainly at the first mention of the mark; repeating it at every occurrence in the text makes reading heavier and adds no protection. In the meta description the same reasoning as the title applies, while the symbol should stay out of URLs: slugs work better with letters, numbers and hyphens.
The ® in Google Ads
Google Ads' editorial policy on punctuation and symbols bans repeated symbols, emoji and symbols used as decoration, and allows those used "in commonly accepted ways", including brand names with non-standard punctuation as long as they match the landing page. The ® next to your own brand falls within normal use.
The sensitive issue is someone else's trade mark. Google's trademark policy doesn't restrict using a trade mark as a keyword, but after a complaint from the owner it can restrict it in ad text. The exceptions cover resellers of the products or of compatible parts and informational sites, and they depend on what's on the landing page. The symbol plays no part in this assessment. If you run campaigns on third-party brands, it's a point to clear up before writing the ads: we also discuss it in the real benefits of Google Ads and handle it for clients in our Google Ads management.
The most common mistakes with the ® online
- The ® on a mark that has only been applied for: the case covered by section 95 of the Trade Marks Act.
- The ® on pages aimed at countries where the mark isn't registered.
- A space between the brand and the symbol ("Post-it ®"): the symbol goes right after the word.
- "(R)" written in plain characters instead of the symbol.
- Double escaping, which makes "®" appear in the title in the SERP.
- The ® repeated in the title, the H1 and every paragraph of the same page.
- Titles that are already long with symbols and separators added, which gets them rewritten.
Before the symbol, check your brand SERP
In the end, the most useful finding of the test isn't about the ®. For "bialetti moka express", "ferrero rocher", "vespa piaggio" and "tic tac" on Google Italy, the brand's site wasn't among the organic results on page one, and for "barilla" there was only a group PDF (in some cases the site appeared in other boxes on the page). On Google UK the same happened for "nutella" and "post-it": supermarkets, stationers, dictionaries and social profiles, and no official site among the blue links. Registered, famous brands, with a brand SERP taken over by marketplaces, social networks and third-party sites. Registration protects the name in front of a judge; in front of Google it doesn't. Before debating whether to put the symbol in the title, check who ranks when someone searches for your brand: it's the brand SEO work we do in our SEO consultancy projects.
Frequently asked questions about the registered trademark symbol
No. UK law doesn't require the ® on a registered trade mark: the owner can choose not to use it. What it forbids, under section 95 of the Trade Marks Act 1994, is using it on a mark that isn't registered.
No. While the application is pending you can use the ™. The ® goes on only after registration; using it earlier is a criminal offence under section 95 of the Trade Marks Act 1994, punishable by a fine up to level 3 on the standard scale (£1,000 in England and Wales).
On Windows, hold down Alt and type 0174 on the numeric keypad. On a Mac with a British or US layout, press Option + R, or open the Character Viewer with Ctrl + Cmd + Space and search for "registered". In HTML, use the reg entity, preceded by an ampersand and followed by a semicolon.
No. Google doesn't list it among the things that matter for titles. In our test on 10 Italian brands only 4 titles out of 83 had the symbol, on Google UK 3 out of 31, and searching for a brand with the ® didn't reward the pages that show it.
The ® indicates a trade mark registered with a trade mark office. The ™ indicates a mark someone claims, registered or not, and is often used while the application is being examined.
