Legal & Compliance

German Website Legal Notice (Impressum) Requirements

Germany's provider-information rules are often summarized as the “Impressumspflicht,” but the required content is conditional. A sole trader, a company, a regulated professional, and a journalistic publisher do not all need identical fields.

Reachability and core information

§ 5 DDG requires covered providers to keep specified information easily recognizable, directly accessible, and permanently available. Core details include the provider's name and address plus a channel for rapid electronic contact and direct communication. Depending on the entity, the notice can also need legal form, representative, register and number, supervisory authority, professional rules, VAT/business identification, or liquidation status.

§ 18 MStV adds provider information for non-personal telemedia and, for journalistic-editorial offerings, a responsible person with name and address. That extra check is conditional: a normal company blog is not automatically treated as a newspaper merely because it publishes posts.

What AllyProof checks

AllyProof looks for a semantically relevant legal-notice link, fetches the discovered page, and evaluates visible fields supported by the page and provider type. It can also flag a consent layer that physically blocks the legal link. Multilingual link and page discovery is allowed; German or English is not assumed to be the only possible language.

Automation cannot determine every corporate fact from a page. Register and professional requirements need comparison with the real entity, and editorial responsibility needs a contextual editorial-scope decision.

Official sources

• § 5 DDG — general information duties
• § 18 MStV — provider and editorial responsibility information
• EU e-Commerce Directive, Article 5

Common questions

Must the link literally say Impressum?

The law focuses on recognizability and direct accessibility rather than prescribing one universal link word. A clear, conventional label reduces ambiguity; AllyProof also uses semantic discovery for equivalent labels in other languages.

Does every website need every possible field?

No. Register, supervisory authority, professional, VAT, capital, and liquidation details apply only when the corresponding facts exist.