An imprint feels like a formality: something you fill in once and then forget. That is exactly where the trouble starts. We look after websites for tradespeople, law firms and small practices out here in the west of Munich, and the imprint mistakes we find are surprisingly often the same ones. Rarely bad intent. Usually a builder template someone filled in years ago, without knowing which fields are legally required and which are not.
Not much changes at the foundations in 2026. In Germany the imprint duty still flows from the Digital Services Act (DDG), which replaced the old Telemedia Act in 2024. What changed most is the name. The mandatory details have stayed essentially the same. And warning letters still go out.
Who actually needs an imprint?
Short answer: almost anyone with a commercial presence online. The moment a website is no longer purely private and family-facing, the duty kicks in. An online shop, obviously. But also the plain digital business card of the electrician in Olching, an Instagram business profile, or a blog that runs ads. The bar for "commercial" is lower than most people assume.
The rule of thumb we work with: if you make money from the site, or want to, you need a complete imprint. When in doubt, one detail too many beats one too few.
The mandatory details, one by one
These are the fields that have to appear on a commercial site. Not all of them apply to everyone, but the first four almost always do.
- Name and address. Full name of the responsible person and a physical address where legal documents can be served. A P.O. box is not enough. It has to be the address where you can actually be reached.
- Legal form and authorised representatives. For a GmbH that means the managing director; for a GbR (a German partnership) it means all partners. This is the detail that goes missing or gets it wrong most often.
- Contact. An email address is mandatory. On top of that a second, fast channel, usually a phone number. Under German case law a contact form on its own does not cut it.
- Commercial register. If you are registered (GmbH, UG, sometimes a GbR), state the register court and the commercial register number.
- VAT identification number. If you hold a VAT ID, it belongs in the imprint. Careful: the VAT ID, not the ordinary tax number from the tax office.
- Supervisory authority and chamber for regulated professions. More on that below, it is a minefield of its own.
Sole trader, GbR or GmbH: what changes?
The legal form decides how much has to go into the imprint. A common misconception is that everyone can use the same template.
Sole traders state their real first and last name, the address and the contact details. A brand name alone is not enough. If the painting business trades as "Farbenfroh Anstriche", the owner's actual name still has to be there.
A GbR is represented jointly by all its partners. So all of them belong in the imprint by name, not just one. We once had a two-person GbR from Germering where only the partner who ran the website was listed. The second was missing entirely. A clear-cut formal defect.
A GmbH or UG needs the most: the full company name including the legal-form suffix, the registered seat, the register court, the commercial register number and the authorised managing directors. If the "GmbH" suffix is missing, or the managing director is not named, the imprint is open to attack.
The mistake nobody sees coming
Now to the one that genuinely surprised us. A client, a tax adviser from the Fuerstenfeldbruck district, came to us with a clean, older website. His imprint was completely correct in substance. Every detail present, even the professional indemnity insurance neatly listed.
Only: the entire imprint was an image. At some point someone had typeset the text in Photoshop and dropped it in as a JPG. To the human eye everything looked fine. To a search engine, and to a screen reader, the page was empty. No text, no machine-readable details, nothing.
That is a problem for two reasons. First, accessibility: a blind visitor using a screen reader simply gets nothing read out. Second, legal certainty. The law requires details that are "easily recognisable, directly accessible and permanently available". An image without alt text is exactly none of those. The same applies when an imprint is loaded in via JavaScript, or hidden behind a click a bot cannot perform.
The fix was trivial. We rebuilt the image text as real HTML. Ten minutes of work and the defect was gone. But without the coincidence that we were checking the site's tech anyway, it would never have surfaced. You only catch things like this if someone looks at the source, not the surface.
Sectors with extra duties
Some professions have more to state than the standard list. If you are regulated, you must give the statutory professional title, the country where it was granted, the responsible chamber and the professional-conduct rules (with a citation). That covers, among others:
- Doctors, dentists, pharmacists, physiotherapists
- Lawyers, tax advisers, auditors
- Architects and consulting engineers
- Skilled trades listed in the craft register (name the chamber)
Online shops and service providers dealing with consumers also have the dispute-resolution point to handle. The old reference to the EU's ODR platform is obsolete, it was shut down in 2025. What remains is the note on whether, and to what extent, you are willing or obliged to take part in a dispute-resolution procedure before a consumer arbitration body.
Your field-by-field checklist
Go through your imprint field by field. Tick honestly.
- Full name of the responsible person (for companies, with the legal-form suffix)
- Physical address for service of documents, not a P.O. box
- Authorised representative named (managing director, all GbR partners)
- Email address present
- Phone number or a second fast channel of communication
- Commercial register: court and number (if registered)
- VAT ID (if you have one), not the ordinary tax number
- For regulated professions: chamber, professional title, professional-conduct rule with citation
- Professional indemnity insurance where required (geographic scope)
- Consumer dispute-resolution note where it applies
- Imprint as real text, not an image, no JavaScript hiding place
- Reachable from every subpage in two clicks at most
That last point gets forgotten a lot. The imprint has to be linked from the footer of every page, not just the homepage. And the link should read "Impressum", not "Legal" or "Info", even though German courts have grown a little more relaxed about this.
A clean imprint is not much work in the end. It costs half an hour once you know what to look for. The only expensive part is what you overlook. If you are not sure whether your site really outputs every detail correctly and in machine-readable form, we will take a free look. We run a 30-minute website check and tell you honestly what is missing and what is fine. Just get in touch through our contact form. We are based in Fuerstenfeldbruck and we know the businesses out here in the west of Munich.
Note: this article reflects our experience from client projects and is not a substitute for legal advice. It relates to German law. For complex cases, please speak to a lawyer.