Suspended over business identity

Google has to be able to say who it is doing business with. Not whether you are reputable, and not whether your products are good — simply which legal entity stands behind the shop, and whether the shop tells a consistent story about it.

Merchants read this notice as an accusation of hiding something. It very rarely is. The usual cause is that a shop has grown, and the company details were written down at four different times by four different people or plugins.

This is not the same as missing contact details

The two get confused constantly, and they are separate faults with separate fixes.

Insufficient contact information is about whether a customer can reach you: a phone number, an email address, a contact form. There is a page on that.

Business identity is about who you say you are: the registered company name, the registration and VAT number, the address that belongs to that entity. A shop can be trivially easy to contact and still fail this one.

What the policy actually requires

Your site has to identify the business behind it, and the identification has to be consistent with itself. The requirement is not that a specific field exists in a specific place — it is that a reviewer who reads your footer, your terms, your about page and your structured data comes away with one answer rather than three.

That is why the finding is so often a contradiction rather than an absence. An absence is one problem. A contradiction is a reason to wonder which version is true, and that wondering is what the policy is written to prevent.

What usually lies behind it

The company was renamed and the footer was not

The most common single cause. A trading name changes, or a holding company takes over, and the update reaches the front page and the invoice template but not the terms, the privacy text, or the structured data block a plugin emits.

Structured data disagrees with the visible text

The theme or an SEO plugin emits an Organization block with a company name that was typed in once during setup. Nobody has looked at it since, because nobody sees it. Google reads it on every crawl.

Critical Identity check

The shop states two different company names on its own pages

Merchant Center reads the site as a description of one business. Two names is a question a reviewer cannot resolve from outside, and unresolved identity is the fault the policy names.

Evidence

footer

Example Trading AB

terms page

Example Group Nordic AB

structured data

Example Shop

Three surfaces, three answers. None of them is necessarily wrong on its own — one is the legal entity, one may be an old name, one is probably a trading name. The fault is that the site never says which is which.

Illustrative — constructed to show the shape of the fault. The numbers are not from a measured run.

An old postal address left in the terms

Addresses move; terms pages are copied forward. The invoice address and the address in clause 1 drift apart, and both remain live.

The postcode and the city run together

Small, mechanical, and it breaks the parsing rather than the reading. A human sees the address fine. An automated check sees one unparseable string where a postcode and a locality should be.

The same value written several ways

556980-7307 in one place, 5569807307 in another — our own, as it happens. Worth separating from a real contradiction, and we do separate it: a formatting variant is not two different numbers, and reporting it as one would be a false alarm.

What the free Quick Scan can see of this

Measurable from outside, without any access:

• Company name, registration number, VAT number, postal address, email and phone, extracted per page.
• Every one of those compared across the pages that state it.
• The Organization block in structured data against the visible text.
• Addresses that will not parse, including the run-together postcode.
• Formatting variants, reported separately from genuine contradictions.

Not measurable from outside:

• Which version is the true one.
• What company details are registered inside your Merchant Center account, and whether they match the site at all.
• Whether a reviewer has previously been given a different answer.

How to narrow it down yourself

1. Open your footer, your terms, your privacy page and your about page side by side. Read only the company details.
2. View the page source and search for Organization. That block is what Google reads, and it is the one nobody checks.
3. Write down every distinct value for name, registration number, VAT number and address. Not every occurrence — every distinct value.
4. Decide which is correct, once, and against your registration certificate rather than against memory.
5. Change every other occurrence to match, including the structured data.
6. Check that your Merchant Center account details say the same thing. That step is inside the account, so it is yours to do.

What we do

We extract the identity fields from every page that carries them and compare them against each other, reporting both values and the pages they sit on for every disagreement. Formatting variants are separated from real contradictions so the list is worth reading.

Where the fix is a settings or template change, the card carries the click-steps. Where the correct value is a decision about your company, we state the conflict and stop — a recommendation dressed as a fact would be worse than no recommendation.

Finding out whether this is your cause

The free Quick Scan fetches your storefront the way Googlebot meets it and compares what your pages say about your business. If two of them disagree, you get both values and the addresses they came from.

It runs while you wait, and it costs nothing — including when it tells you the cause is somewhere we cannot see.