The legal notice, or Impressum, is the part of a website that most businesses set up once and then leave untouched for years. That is exactly where the problem starts. Since 6 May 2024 the legal basis in Germany is no longer the Telemedia Act but the Digital Services Act implementation law, the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, Federal Law Gazette 2024 I No. 149). And the European online dispute resolution platform that countless legal notices, terms and order confirmations still link to was repealed with effect from 20 July 2025 (Regulation (EU) 2024/3228, Article 1). Anyone who has not followed up now cites a repealed provision and points to a dead link, on the very page that is supposed to demonstrate reachability and seriousness. This article sorts out what actually belongs on a commercial German website in 2026: the eight blocks of information required by Section 5 (1) DDG (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, Section 5), the elements that have to go, the technical requirements for reachability and placement, and a maintenance routine that keeps the mandatory details from going unnoticed for another five years. It offers orientation and does not replace legal advice.
Key takeaways
- Section 5 DDG hinges not on legal form or size but on activity: anyone offering digital services commercially needs a legal notice.
- Implementation rarely fails on understanding, usually on detail — a PO box instead of a service address, or the tax number instead of the VAT identification number.
- The reference to the EU online dispute resolution platform no longer belongs in the notice since it was discontinued on 20 March 2025 (Regulation (EU) 2024/3228).
- The details must be easily recognisable, directly accessible and permanently available — two clicks from any page is the accepted benchmark.
- Beyond Section 5 DDG, further duties apply depending on the offer, for instance on pricing, withdrawal or consumer dispute resolution.
- A legal notice does not age with time but with events: relocation, change of legal form or new management must be reflected immediately.
Who the legal notice duty actually applies to
Section 5 (1) DDG does not attach to legal form or company size but to the activity: anyone providing digital services on a commercial basis, normally against payment, must keep the listed information easily recognisable, directly accessible and permanently available (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, Section 5 (1)). Commercial in this sense means a sustained, planned activity; an intention to make a profit is, on the prevailing reading, not required. That brings far more websites into scope than many operators assume. The dividing line does not run between large and small, but between purely private and commercial.
In practice: a sole trader with four subpages needs a complete legal notice just as much as a limited company with an attached shop. An association that displays sponsor logos, sells advertising space or collects membership fees online has left the purely private sphere. And a company profile on a social network is a digital service in its own right; according to the legal guidance published by the German chambers of commerce, a clearly labelled reference to the legal notice on the company's own website is normally accepted, provided it leads there without detours (DIHK and IHK legal guidance on internet law). If you are rebuilding your site anyway, plan the mandatory pages in early: our overview of typical relaunch mistakes lists them among the items that regularly surface only after go-live.
From TMG to DDG: what changed in 2024
Sole traders and freelancers
The duty applies in full even without a commercial register entry. Instead of register and legal form, the focus here is on the name, an address suitable for service of documents and, in regulated professions, the chamber and professional title.
Companies of any size
For legal entities the legal form, the authorised representatives and, where capital figures are stated at all, the share capital are added (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, Section 5 (1) no. 1).
Associations with commercial elements
As soon as advertising, sponsoring, a shop or paid offers come into play, the presence is commercial. The association register, the registration number and the representatives under the statutes then belong in the notice as well.
Profiles on social networks
Every commercially used profile needs its own provider identification. A clearly labelled reference to the website's legal notice is described in the chamber guidance as a workable route; a link to the home page is not.
Landing pages and microsites
Campaign pages on their own domain are separate services. That is precisely where the legal notice is most often missing, because the page was built without the familiar footer of the main site.
Online shops and marketplace profiles
In a shop, consumer protection duties come on top of Section 5 DDG: withdrawal instructions, the model withdrawal form, price and shipping information and product-related details.
The eight required details in practice
The statutory text is short, and implementation rarely fails on comprehension. It fails on detail: a post office box instead of a street address, the tax number instead of the VAT identification number, a missing second way of getting in touch alongside the e-mail address. The overview below follows the order of the statute and names the point where each item tends to break down.
Service providers shall keep the following information easily recognisable, directly accessible and permanently available for digital services offered on a commercial basis and normally against payment.
1. Name and address
The name under which the business operates and the address of the establishment. A post office box is not sufficient, because the detail is meant to allow service of documents. For legal entities, the legal form and the authorised representatives are added, so for a GmbH the managing directors with full names.
2. Fast electronic contact
Details that allow fast electronic contact and direct communication, including the e-mail address. The address itself belongs in the legal notice; a contact form somewhere else does not cover this item according to the case law.
3. Competent supervisory authority
Required where the service or activity needs official authorisation, for example insurance mediation, security services or financial investment brokerage. Name and address of the authority are required, in practice supplemented by its website.
4. Register and registration number
Commercial register, association register, partnership register or cooperative register together with the registration number. The item drops out where no entry exists; the registry court belongs to the complete designation.
5. Regulated professions
For chamber professions the competent chamber, the statutory professional title, the state that awarded it and the relevant professional rules must be named, along with a pointer to where those rules can be consulted. Health professions, legal and tax advice, architecture and engineering are among those affected.
6. VAT identification number
The VAT identification number or the business identification number must be stated where one exists (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, Section 5 (1) no. 6). The tax office reference number is not meant here and, for data protection reasons, is better left out of the legal notice.
7. Winding up and liquidation
If a stock corporation, partnership limited by shares or limited company is being wound up or liquidated, that has to appear in the legal notice. The item is rarely needed and then reliably forgotten, because other matters are more pressing at that stage.
8. Audiovisual media services
Providers of audiovisual media services add the state of establishment and the competent regulatory and supervisory bodies. For a business with a company film on the home page this is usually not relevant; for an own media library it can be.
Two points deserve a separate remark. First the address: what is required is an address at which documents can actually be served. Anyone working from home cannot replace it with a post office box, and arrangements based on a pure mail-forwarding address are delicate, because the detail is meant to reflect the actual establishment. Second the contact route: the e-mail address is mandatory, but writing it as an image or with spaces to deter spam makes it hard to use and therefore easy to attack. Server-side measures and clean deliverability are the better answer, as described in our article on SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
The second communication route besides e-mail
The element that has to go in 2026
For years one sentence was part of the standard repertoire of every German legal notice and set of terms: the reference to the European Commission's online dispute resolution platform, the ODR or OS platform. That duty is gone. Regulation (EU) No 524/2013 was repealed with effect from 20 July 2025, and the submission of new complaints already ended on 20 March 2025 (Regulation (EU) 2024/3228, Articles 1 and 2). Since then the Commission states on its pages that the platform has been discontinued and that the national dispute resolution bodies should be used instead (European Commission, notice on the discontinuation of the ODR platform).
The legislator's reasoning is unusually blunt. The platform attracted between two and three million visitors (Regulation (EU) 2024/3228, recitals), but was used by only around 5 percent (Regulation (EU) 2024/3228) of the consumers who filed a complaint at all; merely 2 percent (Regulation (EU) 2024/3228) of complaints received a positive reply from the trader, and in the end roughly 200 cases (Regulation (EU) 2024/3228) a year across the Union actually reached a procedure. For website operators those figures mainly explain why a text block practised for more than ten years suddenly disappears.
| Element | Until 19 July 2025 | Since 20 July 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Link to the ODR platform in the legal notice | Mandatory detail for online traders under the ODR Regulation | Legal basis repealed, the link leads nowhere |
| Notice in the terms and conditions | Standard sentence referring to the platform | Delete without replacement or replace with an accurate notice |
| Notice in checkout and confirmation mail | Stored as a text block in many shop systems | Search the templates and remove it, including PDF attachments |
| Notice on the consumer arbitration body | Required under the Consumer Dispute Resolution Act | Remains in force and has to be reviewed separately |
| E-mail address for consumers | Derived from the ODR Regulation | Still follows from Section 5 DDG |
- Legal notice: remove the wording and the link completely, including older language versions of the page
- Terms and customer information: check the standard clause, the sentence frequently appears there a second time
- Checkout: review checkout copy, the confirmation page and the mandatory notices above the order button
- Transactional mails: order confirmation, shipping confirmation and invoice templates often carry the block in the footer
- Withdrawal instructions and attached PDF documents: separately maintained files are regularly overlooked when copy changes
- Marketplace and platform profiles: the seller information stored there is maintained apart from your own website
- Newsletter templates and signatures: the notice tends to travel into every template ever copied from the legal notice
Why the dead link is more than a cosmetic flaw
The notice under the German Consumer Dispute Resolution Act is a separate matter. Traders who operate a website or use general terms and conditions must state, in an easily accessible way, whether they are willing or obliged to participate in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration body. Exempt from this duty is any trader who employed ten or fewer people on 31 December of the previous year (Consumer Dispute Resolution Act, Section 36). The list of recognised consumer arbitration bodies is maintained by the Federal Office of Justice (Federal Office of Justice, Consumer Dispute Resolution Act). So when the ODR block goes, the VSBG notice should not disappear with it but be reviewed on its own terms.
Reachability: two clicks, a clear label, real text
The law does not only require the right details but also that they can be found: easily recognisable, directly accessible, permanently available. The German Federal Court of Justice held that the provider identification need not sit on the home page and may be reached through two links, provided their labels are familiar to the average user, for example „Kontakt“ and „Impressum“ (Federal Court of Justice, judgment of 20 July 2006, case I ZR 228/03). That is where the widely cited two-click rule comes from. It is an upper limit, not a design goal: a footer link on every subpage settles the requirement in a single click.
- The link sits in the footer of every page, including landing pages, campaign pages and error pages
- The label is unambiguous: „Impressum“ is established, creative alternatives such as „Who we are“ are not
- The details appear as HTML text on the page, not as an image, a PDF file or a download
- The page is readable without a login, without a consent click and without active JavaScript
- The content is reachable by keyboard and screen reader, and the link is part of the tab order
- The page returns status 200 and no redirect chain across several domains
- The details sit directly on the page, not behind another click inside an accordion
- Search engines may see the page as noindex, while people can still open it at any time
The gap usually sits at the edges
Technically this is a question of templates, not of copy. If the footer is maintained as one component and rendered on every page type, the gap does not arise in the first place; if it is copied per page, it arrives with the next special layout. The same applies to connected functions: a separate booking module, as described in our article on online appointment booking on your website, often runs under its own address and then needs its own placement of the mandatory details. In an online shop the checkout is added, which for conversion reasons is frequently built without navigation and without a footer. Designing this deliberately costs nothing in conversion and adds legal certainty; in web design the legal notice link is simply a mandatory element of the page template.
What is often missing alongside the legal notice
The details under Section 5 DDG are the core, but not the entire set of duties for a commercial website. Further rules apply depending on the offer, and they live in different places: partly in the legal notice, partly on separate pages, partly inside the ordering process. The overview below names the items most frequently left open in reviews.
Person responsible for editorial content
Anyone providing journalistic and editorial content, for example a regularly maintained specialist blog or magazine, must additionally name a responsible person with name and address (Interstate Media Treaty, Section 18 (2)). The detail usually sits at the end of the legal notice.
Withdrawal and model form
In distance selling, the withdrawal instructions and the model withdrawal form are part of the pre-contractual information (Introductory Act to the German Civil Code, Article 246a). Neither belongs in the legal notice; both belong on a separate page linked from the ordering process.
Price and shipping information
Total prices including VAT, additional shipping costs and, where applicable, unit prices follow from the German Price Indication Ordinance. Faulty shipping cost notices are among the classic complaints in online retail.
Privacy policy as its own page
The information duties under Article 13 GDPR are legally distinct from the legal notice and belong on a page of their own. How to separate the two cleanly is set out in our GDPR checklist for websites.
Accessibility statement
Many services in electronic commerce fall under the German accessibility act. What that means in practice is summarised in the article on the BFSG duty for websites; the implementation side is described under accessible websites.
Product-related mandatory details
In a shop, details on the manufacturer, the responsible person in the EU, product identifiers and warnings are added. The article on GPSR details in an online shop explains which of them belongs where in the offer.
Keep the legal notice and the privacy policy apart
One item is new enough that many legal notices do not know it yet: if an AI-supported assistant or chatbot operates on the website, separate transparency requirements apply. They do not belong in the legal notice but at the point where users interact with the system. The article on labelling AI chatbots describes which notices are expected and how they fit unobtrusively into the interface.
A maintenance routine instead of copy and paste
A legal notice does not age with time, it ages with events. Most errors therefore do not arise when the page is first written but at the moment something changes about the company and the website is the last to hear about it. A maintenance routine has two parts: clearly named triggers and a fixed date that applies even when no trigger has occurred.
- Define the triggers: change of legal form, change of company name, relocation, change in the management, new chamber membership, issue of a VAT identification number, a new shop, a new landing page.
- Assign responsibility: one person decides when a change affects the website. Without that assignment, the website is the last to learn the new address.
- Document the occurrences: a short list of every place where mandatory details appear, from the legal notice page through shop templates to social network profiles.
- Set an annual date: a fixed control date on which the list is walked through completely, regardless of specific triggers.
- Log the changes: record the date, the trigger and the fields changed, so that in a dispute it remains traceable since when a given detail has been online.
- Plan for legal review: for special constellations, regulated professions or new business models, provide for a check by your own legal counsel.
| Trigger | What to check | Where the detail comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Change of legal form or company name | Name, legal form, representatives, registration number, VAT identification number | Commercial register extract, tax adviser |
| Relocation or new establishment | Address in the legal notice, in shop templates, on invoices and in platform profiles | Trade registration, internal master data |
| Change in the management | Authorised representatives and, where relevant, the person responsible for editorial content | Shareholder resolution, commercial register |
| New online shop or ordering process | Withdrawal, model form, price and shipping details, mandatory notices above the order button | Legal advice, shop configuration |
| New landing page or subdomain | Footer with the legal notice link, privacy policy, reachability within two clicks | Page template in the content system |
| Annual control date | All occurrences, outdated legal references, dead links, currency of chamber details | Your own occurrence list |
The effort involved is modest once the occurrence list exists: in ongoing care, a complete check typically takes one to two hours a year, with the larger share going to shop templates and transactional mails (project experience). Why the same logic applies to technology, updates and security is described in our article on why website maintenance is not optional. If you would rather hand the upkeep over, the services are set out under website care.
What a breach means in practice
The formal sanction sits in Section 33 DDG: keeping information unavailable, incorrect or incomplete contrary to Section 5 (1) is an administrative offence, with a penalty ceiling of up to EUR 50,000 (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, Section 33 (2) in conjunction with (6)). For legal entities with total turnover above EUR 10 million, the ceiling can be oriented towards up to 1 percent of total turnover (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, Section 33 (8)). Those figures describe the statutory frame, not everyday practice.
Day to day, the more likely route is a different one: a competition law warning letter from a competitor or an entitled association, combined with costs and a cease-and-desist declaration. Missing or outdated mandatory details are a rewarding target because they can be established from the outside without effort and require no case-by-case investigation. That is exactly why the half day a thorough review costs is worth more than the debate about whether a formal defect will really be pursued.
Orientation, not legal advice
Sources and studies