Suspended for insufficient contact information

Of all the suspension reasons, this is the one merchants dismiss fastest. The contact page is right there. The phone number works. Somebody at Google has clearly not looked.

Then they look properly, and find the old address still sitting in the terms page from before the company moved.

What the policy actually requires

Google requires that a shopper can tell who they are buying from and how to reach them: a business identity, and at least one working contact route, stated clearly on the site itself. The point of the requirement is not paperwork. It is that a shopper who has a problem after paying must be able to find the seller.

What trips shops up is that the requirement is about the answer being single. A site that states two different company names, two registration numbers, or two postal addresses has not provided contact information twice. It has provided an unanswerable question.

What usually lies behind it

Ordered by how often each turns out to be the real cause.

The same detail in two versions

The finding is rarely an absence. It is a discrepancy: the footer says one thing, the terms page says another, and the structured data says a third. Each was correct on the day it was written.

Critical Business identity check

Two different postal addresses on the shop's own pages

A reviewer checking who they are dealing with finds two answers. Where the shop itself disagrees about where it is, nothing on the page can settle it.

Evidence

footer

current address

terms page

previous address, never updated

structured data

a third variant, from the theme default

Typical after a move. The footer is edited because it is visible; the terms page is edited by nobody because nobody reads it.

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

Structured data that disagrees with the visible text

Your theme almost certainly emits an Organization block containing a company name, and it is often a leftover from the theme demo or from an earlier business name. Google reads machine-readable data as a statement about your business, judged the same way as the visible text.

This one is worth checking first precisely because nobody looks at it. It is not on the page as far as a human is concerned.

Two registration or VAT numbers

Rarer and more serious. Usually a group with several legal entities where one number belongs to the parent and one to the operating company, and different pages were written by different people.

An address that cannot be parsed

Postcode and city run together without a space. Trivially small, entirely mechanical, and it breaks automated address parsing — which means an automated check sees a malformed address rather than a valid one.

Spelling variants that are not contradictions

A company name written three ways across a site — with and without the legal form, with and without a comma. Worth separating from real discrepancies, because they are not the same problem and should not be reported as if they were. A variant is untidy. A contradiction is a policy breach.

A contact route that does not work

An email address at a domain that no longer resolves, or a contact form that posts to nothing. It is stated, so it looks present, and it fails the moment anyone uses it.

What the free Quick Scan can see of this

Measurable from outside, without any access:

• Company name, registration and VAT number, postal address, email and phone, extracted per page across the whole shop and compared between pages.
• Whether the company name in structured data matches the one in the visible text.
• Whether the postcode and city are separated in a way an address parser can read.
• Which contact routes are stated, and whether the pages that carry them are reachable from the footer.
• The same comparison across every language version of the site.

Not measurable from outside:

• What business details your Merchant Center account holds, and whether they match the site. That comparison is one of the most likely causes of this particular notice, and it needs someone logged in.
• Whether the contact route is answered. We can see that an address is stated and that the domain resolves. Whether anyone reads the inbox is not something a crawl establishes.
• Whether a reviewer objected to the business identity itself rather than to its presentation.

The second list comes back to you as a checklist rather than as findings.

How to narrow it down yourself

1. Open every page that states who you are — footer, contact, about, terms, privacy, cookie, and any invoice or order-confirmation template you control.
2. Write the company name, registration number, VAT number and address from each one into a single list. Not from memory; copied.
3. Look at the list. If any column has more than one distinct value, you have found the cause, or at least a cause.
4. View the page source on a product page and search for Organization. Compare what it says against your list.
5. Compare all of it against your Merchant Center business information. This step is yours; nobody outside the account can do it.

What we do

We extract the identity fields from every page that carries them, compare the versions against each other, and report the discrepancies with both values quoted and the policy clause they breach. Spelling variants are reported separately from genuine contradictions, because conflating the two produces a list that is technically complete and practically useless.

What we cannot do is check your account against your site. That comparison goes into the checklist we hand back, with what to open and what to compare — and it is marked as unverified by us, because it is.