What Is an Impressum? Who Needs One and What to Include

So what is an impressum? An impressum is a legal notice that identifies who runs a website — the person or company behind it, where they’re based, and how to reach them. If you operate a business-like website that’s accessible in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland, you almost certainly need one. This isn’t a privacy policy and it isn’t optional decoration. It’s a named legal duty, and the law behind it in Germany changed recently in a way most online guides haven’t caught up with.

From a business perspective, the impressum matters because the penalty for getting it wrong isn’t a Google ranking dip — it’s a formal warning letter (an Abmahnung) from a competitor or a consumer association, often with legal costs attached. So it’s worth understanding exactly who’s on the hook and what the notice has to say.

What is an impressum? (the short answer)

An impressum is a mandatory legal notice that states who is responsible for a website. The word is German, and there’s no clean English equivalent, which is why English-speaking site owners often miss it entirely. The closest term is a legal notice — sometimes written as “imprint” or “site notice.” Its single job is identification: it tells visitors and authorities exactly who they’re dealing with.

Think of it as the digital version of the address and registration details a brick-and-mortar shop has to display. A reader landing on your site should be able to find a real name, a real postal address, and a working way to contact you within a click or two. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland each have their own law requiring this, which is why the duty trips up businesses that serve a German-speaking audience without realizing they fall under it.

The impressum is usually a dedicated page, linked clearly in the footer with a label like “Impressum,” “Legal Notice,” or “Imprint.” It has to be reachable from anywhere on the site — typically two clicks or fewer — and it can’t be hidden inside a contact form or buried in fine print.

Who needs an impressum?

The short version: if your website is anything other than purely private and non-commercial, assume you need one. The laws don’t care whether you call yourself a business. They care whether your site has a commercial or business-like purpose.

In Germany, the duty applies to “business-like” telemedia — which courts read broadly. Here’s the practical breakdown of who’s covered:

• Companies and freelancers — any commercial website, online shop, or professional services site. No exceptions.
• Sites that run ads or affiliate links — monetization makes a site business-like, even a “personal” blog.
• Sites with a marketing or lead-generation purpose — if it exists to grow a business, it counts.
• Larger content sites and influencers — regular publishing aimed at an audience is generally treated as business-like.
• Associations, clubs, and NGOs with an outward-facing presence.

The narrow exception is a genuinely private site: a personal page with no ads, no affiliate links, no business intent, and no monetization. In practice, that’s a small slice of the web. The moment money or marketing enters the picture, the exemption evaporates.

Quick test: Could your website plausibly help you earn money, win clients, or build a commercial audience? If yes, treat the impressum as required.

This is also where the geography catches people out. The duty attaches to who’s offering the service, not just where the server sits. A German-registered company needs an impressum regardless of where it hosts. Austria and Switzerland apply their own versions to operators based there. We’ll come back to the cross-border case below, because that’s the question we get most.

What an impressum must contain (checklist)

The required fields are remarkably consistent across the German-speaking countries, because they all aim at the same thing: unambiguous identification of the operator. Here’s the core checklist for a German impressum, which is the strictest and a safe baseline for the region.

Field	Required for	Notes
Full name (and legal form, e.g. GmbH)	Everyone	For companies, the registered company name and legal form.
Postal address	Everyone	A real physical address — no PO box.
Email address	Everyone	A monitored address, not a contact form alone.
Phone number	Strongly recommended	Courts want a “fast electronic” channel; a phone number is the safe choice.
Commercial register entry + number	Registered companies	Plus the registering court (e.g. Amtsgericht).
VAT ID (USt-IdNr.)	VAT-registered businesses	If you have one, list it.
Authorized representative	Companies	Managing director(s) or equivalent.
Regulatory/professional details	Regulated professions	Chamber, professional title, supervising authority, relevant rules.
Person responsible for content	Editorial/journalistic content	Name and address under the media-state-treaty rules.

A few details that matter in practice. The address must be a genuine place where you can be served documents, which rules out a PO box. The contact channels have to allow “fast electronic communication and direct contact” — that’s why an email address is non-negotiable and a phone number is the cautious default. And the notice has to be permanently available, easy to find, and immediately recognizable as the impressum.

Impressum vs privacy policy: the difference

This is the single most common confusion, so let’s be precise. An impressum and a privacy policy are two separate documents with two separate jobs, and you generally need both.

• The impressum answers “who runs this site?” It’s about identification — name, address, contact, registration. Its legal basis is the German DDG (and the Austrian and Swiss equivalents).
• The privacy policy answers “what data do you collect and why?” It’s about data processing — what you track, on what legal ground, who you share it with, and what rights users have. Its legal basis is the GDPR.

Here’s why the distinction matters for anyone running analytics. The impressum doesn’t depend on whether you set cookies — even a site with zero tracking still needs one if it’s business-like. The privacy policy, by contrast, is driven entirely by what data you process. The moment you add an analytics tool, you take on privacy-policy obligations under the GDPR, and often a cookie-consent layer too. They’re triggered by different things, and satisfying one does not satisfy the other.

For the data side of the equation, the privacy policy is a separate document with its own required contents. Keep them as distinct, separately labeled pages. Merging them into one “legal” page is a common mistake that makes both harder to read and weaker if challenged.

The current legal basis (DDG, not the old TMG)

If you’ve read other guides on this topic, most of them are out of date — and this is exactly where we can be more accurate. For years, the German impressum duty lived in § 5 of the Telemediengesetz (TMG). You’ll still see countless impressum pages and blog posts that cite “§ 5 TMG.”

That law is gone. On 14 May 2024, the Telemediengesetz was repealed and replaced by the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz (DDG) — Germany’s Digital Services Act, which implements the EU framework of the same name. The provider-identification duty (the Anbieterkennzeichnung) moved over essentially unchanged and now lives in § 5 DDG.

Practical takeaway: The obligation itself didn’t change in substance — the same fields are required. What changed is the statute it’s based on. If your impressum still says “Angaben gemäß § 5 TMG,” update it to “§ 5 DDG.”

One reassuring nuance from German legal commentary: there’s no requirement to cite the statute in the impressum at all. Simply labeling the page “Impressum” or “Anbieterkennzeichnung” is sufficient. So the cleanest fix is often to drop the statute reference rather than maintain a number that keeps changing. Being current here is a small thing, but it signals that the rest of your notice is maintained too.

Germany isn’t the only jurisdiction with this duty, and the requirements broaden once you cross the border:

• Germany — § 5 DDG (formerly § 5 TMG). The strictest and most-litigated regime. See Germany’s impressum rules for the country-specific detail.
• Austria — § 5 of the E-Commerce-Gesetz (ECG), with additional disclosure duties under the UGB and GewO for registered businesses and tradespeople. Non-compliance can draw administrative fines of up to €3,000. More on Austria.
• Switzerland — Article 3(1)(s) of the Unfair Competition Act (UWG), which requires anyone offering goods or services online to give clear identity and contact details, including an email address. More on Switzerland.

The common thread: every one of these laws demands a real name, a real address, and a working contact channel. Build your notice to the German standard and you’ll comfortably clear the Austrian and Swiss bars too.

Do I need an impressum if my site isn’t German but has German visitors?

This is the question that worries international site owners most, so let’s separate the myth from the rule.

The German impressum duty attaches to the operator, not to the audience. If you’re a US, UK, or non-EU company that simply happens to get German visitors, German law generally does not force you to add a German-law impressum just because traffic arrives from Germany. The duty follows where the service provider is established.

But that clean answer has important edges:

1. If you have an establishment in Germany — a branch, a subsidiary, an office — you fall under German law for that operation.
2. If you’re an EU business, you face the same identification obligation under your own country’s transposition of the EU rules; the wording differs, the duty doesn’t.
3. If you actively target the German market — German-language pages, prices in euros, German shipping, marketing aimed at German customers — you should treat full compliance as the safe path, because regulators and competitors look at substance, not just registration.
4. Consumer-protection and contact-info rules in many jurisdictions overlap with what an impressum provides anyway, so a clear “who we are and how to reach us” page is good practice regardless.

If German-speaking customers are a real part of your business, the cost of a compliant legal-notice page is trivial next to the cost of an Abmahnung. When in doubt, add one.

For anything genuinely ambiguous — a real establishment question, a regulated profession, a complex corporate structure — this is the point to get advice from a German lawyer rather than rely on a generic guide. The fields are simple; the question of whether you’re caught is the part worth a professional opinion.

What this means for an analytics or website owner

Here’s the connection most cookie-banner vendors skip. If you’re setting up analytics on a website, you’ve almost certainly built a business-like site — which means the impressum question is already on your desk, sitting right next to the privacy and consent work.

The two duties land at different moments. The impressum is triggered the instant your site is commercial, before you’ve placed a single tag. The privacy policy and consent layer are triggered the instant you start collecting data with an analytics tool. So a typical compliance stack for a German-facing site looks like this:

1. Impressum — identifies who runs the site (§ 5 DDG). Required because the site is business-like.
2. Privacy policy — explains what data you collect and on what legal ground (GDPR). Required because you run analytics.
3. Consent management — captures and respects user choices before non-essential tags fire. Required for cookie-based or personal-data tracking in the EEA.

Treat them as a set, not a single page. A practical sequence: publish a clean impressum and privacy policy first, then layer your tracking on top with a consent mechanism so non-essential tags only fire after agreement. Doing it in that order keeps your legal foundation ahead of your data collection, rather than scrambling to retrofit it after launch.

Continue Learning

These pages go deeper on the jurisdiction and privacy side of the picture:

• Germany’s impressum and analytics rules — the country-specific detail behind § 5 DDG and how it interacts with tracking.
• Austria and Switzerland — the ECG and UWG versions of the duty for the rest of the DACH region.
• GDPR — the data-processing side that drives your privacy policy and consent setup, distinct from the impressum.

Bottom line

An impressum is a legal-notice page that says who runs a website, required by German, Austrian, and Swiss law for essentially any business-like site. It’s separate from your privacy policy: the impressum is about identity, the privacy policy is about data. The legal basis in Germany is now § 5 of the DDG, which replaced the old TMG in May 2024 — so if your notice still cites the TMG, update it or simply drop the statute reference. And if you’re far enough along to be installing analytics, you’re business-like by definition, which means the impressum belongs at the front of your compliance checklist, not the back of it.