Business Directories Germany: The 30 Most Important Listings

Why business directories matter for SMEs in Germany

Business directories provide citations: mentions of your business with name, address and phone number outside your own website. Map services, directories and review portals show this data where customers search for a service and a location. Google itself says that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to appear in local search results. How citations work in general is explained in the article on local citations and directory listings.

The target group is broad. According to Destatis, around 3.2 million businesses in Germany were SMEs in 2024, or 99.3% of all businesses. In 2025, the craft registers (Handwerksrollen) listed 1,038,126 businesses. And customers are online: according to DataReportal, around 78.5 million people in Germany used the internet in October 2025, a penetration rate of 93.5%.

The search market sets the priorities. Google has an 87.84% market share in Germany, Bing 6.49% (Statcounter, September 2026). That makes your Google Business Profile the most important single listing. Every other listing confirms the same data in more places or reaches people who search via Apple Maps, Bing or a business directory. What else counts for local visibility in Germany is covered in the article Local SEO in Germany.

How many listings you really need

The list below has 30 listings because it covers industries from medical practices to industrial suppliers. For a single business, we recommend 10 to 15 of them: the six mandatory listings, a few general portals and the industry portal for your own sector. Ten fully maintained listings do more than thirty half-finished ones that nobody updates after the next move.

The tiers mean:

• Tier 1: mandatory for every business with an address in Germany.
• Tier 2: high value, either across industries or as a key portal for one industry.
• Tier 3: add-ons once Tier 1 and Tier 2 are in good shape.

The 30 listings at a glance

Prices as of October 2026, all for business customers. Where a figure comes only from a third-party source, this is noted. Before you sign a contract, the provider's pricing page always takes precedence.

Tier 1: mandatory listings

Tier 2: general portals

Tier 2: industry portals

Tier 3: general add-ons

Tier 3: industry and chamber services

What the list does not cover

Some channels are missing from the numbered list because they only matter for specific target groups. If they apply to you, add them:

• Law firms: the official lawyer directory of the BRAK (German Federal Bar) for checking authorization to practice, the Anwaltauskunft of the German Bar Association (DAV) and DATEV SmartExperts.
• Tax advisors: DATEV SmartExperts, DATEV's search platform for tax advisors, lawyers and auditors.
• Restaurants: Speisekarte.de, a golocal partner. Quandoo has shut down its service.
• Energy and environmental sector in Saxony and parts of Bavaria: the IHK ecoFinder Plus. It is run by five IHKs (chambers of industry and commerce): Chemnitz, Dresden, Leipzig, Nuremberg for Middle Franconia and Würzburg-Schweinfurt. Only companies from their districts can register, and registration is free. It succeeds the nationwide IHK ecoFinder, which was discontinued on December 31, 2025.
• Export and procurement: Kompass, which, according to IHK Wiesbaden, has 5.1 million company profiles from 60 countries. Only for export- or procurement-oriented B2B companies.
• Training companies: the nationwide portal meine-ausbildung-in-deutschland.de of IHK Gesellschaft für Digitalisierung, to which the old address of the IHK apprenticeship exchange redirects. You do not need a listing there: the portal reads apprenticeship offers free of charge from your website and from the Federal Employment Agency, provided the ad meets certain criteria. There are also regional exchanges with their own listings, such as the IHK-Börse with a focus on Hanover, where training companies can register free of charge according to IHK Hannover.
• Employers: kununu is a platform for employer reviews, not a customer channel. Maintain the profile as soon as you are hiring.

There is no nationwide IHK company directory along the lines of Austria's WKO Firmen A-Z. IHK Ostthüringen shut down its regional company database at the end of 2025: of 33,000 member companies, only around 4,500 used the listing.

Older lists include directories that no longer exist in that form. goyellow.de redirects to Gelbe Seiten, klicktel.de to 11880.com. Foursquare has shut down the Foursquare City Guide, the app in December 2024 and the web version in April 2025. None of these belong on your list.

Official registers: mandatory, but no SEO lever

Four official registers are often confused with business directories. You do not register in any of them for marketing purposes.

• Commercial register (Handelsregister): the official register of merchants and commercial companies, kept by the local courts and accessible via the joint register portal of the federal states. Since August 2022, entries there can be viewed free of charge and without registration. The Austrian counterpart is the Firmenbuch.
• Company register (Unternehmensregister): the central platform for company data, through which financial statements, among other things, are disclosed. It is not a directory you sign up for.
• Trade register (Gewerberegister): It is kept by the trade authority. Name, business name, business address and the registered activity may be made generally accessible; further data is only available to those who credibly show a legal interest (§ 14 GewO).
• Transparency register (Transparenzregister): It records the beneficial owners under the Money Laundering Act. Since the CJEU ruling of November 22, 2022 (C-37/20 and C-601/20), the public only gets access with a legitimate interest.

Official professional directories such as the Steuerberaterverzeichnis (no. 29) work in a similar way. They prove admission, but you cannot search them by specialty.

None of these registers does anything for your ranking. They still matter because they provide the template: the registered company name, legal form and registered office from the commercial register belong in your legal notice (Impressum) and in every directory listing, character for character. The register data is also public, and the senders of fake invoices use the commercial register as a data source.

Which directories feed each other

Many listings are connected. If you know the connections, you save work and find sources of errors faster.

• Publisher network: Gelbe Seiten, Das Örtliche and Das Telefonbuch are published by DTM Deutsche Tele Medien GmbH together with around 100 publishers. Via DTM's listing service, you create one free business listing for all three directories. An error in it therefore quickly shows up in all three.
• golocal: The operator is pdm solutions GmbH. The golocal partner list names Das Örtliche, Gelbe Seiten, Das Telefonbuch, 11880, anwalt.de, KennstDuEinen and Yelp, among others. How data flows between the partners is not documented. The list is also outdated: GoYellow and Quandoo are still on it.
• 11880: According to the legal notice, the provider of 11880.com and werkenntdenBESTEN is 11880 Internet Services AG, based in Essen. klicktel.de redirects to 11880.com.
• Microsoft: Listings from Bing Places appear in Bing search and in Bing Maps.
• Apple: A profile in Apple Business controls the place cards in Apple Maps, Safari and Spotlight.
• meinestadt.de: According to the provider, the paid profiles are distributed to more than 40 directories via its partner SOR Digital.
• Chambers: With Handwerker-Radar, business data is published and maintained through the responsible chamber of crafts.

This leads to a simple rule: fix errors at the source. You change a wrong phone number in the publisher network via DTM's listing service, not in each directory separately.

NAP consistency: one data sheet for all listings

NAP stands for name, address and phone number. These details must be identical everywhere, down to the spelling. Pick one variant for the legal form and for street names, for example “Straße” or “Str.”, and stick with it.

Wrong information costs you customers directly. In BrightLocal's Business Listings Trust Report 2021, a survey of more than 1,000 US consumers, 63% said they would not use a business if they found incorrect information. 77% had seen conflicting details across different directories. Consumers are most likely to lose trust when the phone number is wrong or inconsistent (66%).

So create a master data sheet: registered company name as in the commercial register, address, phone number, website, opening hours, primary category, short description and logo. Every listing is copied from it, never typed from memory.

Order of setup

1. Finish the master data sheet.
2. Create or claim your Google Business Profile and verify it.
3. Bing Places: import the profile from your Google Business Profile and check the data against the data sheet.
4. Apple Business: create the place card. If you were already listed in Business Connect, you will find your data there.
5. Publisher network: search for your business on Gelbe Seiten, Das Örtliche and Das Telefonbuch. If a listing already exists, complete it instead of creating a second one.
6. Tier 2: 11880.com, golocal, Facebook or LinkedIn depending on your target group, Yelp for consumer businesses, ProvenExpert for services without a storefront. Add the most important industry portal for your sector.
7. Tier 3 only once steps 1 to 6 are done properly.
8. For each listing, record the URL, login, verification status and date of the last check in a list.

Cost traps and scams

With Google, Bing, Apple and the publisher network, the basic listing costs nothing. You pay for add-on packages, for example at jameda, and for industry portals without a free profile, such as Treatwell. You should know four traps: an automatic subscription at reputable providers and three schemes with letters made to look official or like invoices.

Starter listing with automatic subscription

Gelbe Seiten, Das Örtliche and Das Telefonbuch offer a starter listing with three free months. After that, it automatically continues as an annual subscription for €358.80 plus VAT, which is €29.90 per month. With Gelbe Seiten, you have to cancel no later than two weeks before the end of the trial period; after that, a notice period of six weeks before the end of the term applies. For Das Örtliche and Das Telefonbuch, check the deadlines in their respective terms. This is an ordinary subscription model, but the deadlines are still easy to miss. Put them in your calendar when you sign up.

Official-looking registration forms

Some providers send forms that look like a request from a public authority. The paid listing is in the fine print. A well-known example is GWE-Wirtschaftsinformationsgesellschaft mbH from Düsseldorf: At the request of the German Association against Economic Crime (DSW), the Düsseldorf Regional Court prohibited its forms (judgment of April 15, 2011, 38 O 148/10). The ban has been final since an order of the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) of February 6, 2013. In 2012, the BGH also ruled (VII ZR 262/11) that an inconspicuously placed fee clause for a basic listing in a business directory, which is usually free, does not become part of the contract (§ 305c(1) BGB). The provision also applies to businesses.

Fake commercial register invoices

Right after an entry in the commercial register, payment requests arrive from supposed judicial payment offices. According to IHK Pfalz (October 2025), the sender often calls itself “Zentrale Zahlstelle” (central payment office) and uses a Frankfurt address. Also typical are the coat of arms of North Rhine-Westphalia, demands between €900 and €2,000 and a payment deadline of three business days. In January 2026, IHK Hannover listed further warning signs: below the coat of arms it only says “Amtsgericht” (local court) without a location, and the IBAN often leads to an account in another EU country, such as Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta or Spain.

Don't confuse the forgeries with genuine invoices. The Zentrale Zahlstelle Justiz at the Higher Regional Court of Hamm is responsible for fee claims for commercial register entries in North Rhine-Westphalia, and other federal states have similar offices. The invoice comes from the payment office in your own state. According to IHK Halle-Dessau, forgers also use exactly this name, but with an Irish IBAN, or call themselves “Zentrale Zahlstelle Leipzig.” A payment office from another state or a foreign IBAN is therefore a warning sign. The fees are set by the Commercial Register Fee Ordinance (Handelsregistergebührenverordnung); according to IHK Hannover, fake demands are usually higher.

Directory scams

These are offers that look like an invoice for an order you have already placed. According to IHK Osnabrück, founders are often targeted shortly after their commercial register entry. A typical trick is a proof of your own old ad: if you sign it, you enter into a new advertising contract with a different company. IHK Osnabrück forwards complaints to the German Association against Economic Crime (DSW), and those affected can also report directly to it.

The rule is short: don't pay for anything you didn't order yourself, and never send back a signed proof. When in doubt, call your IHK.

Directories, reviews and AI answers

Many listings come with reviews. In BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, a survey of 1,002 US consumers, 97% said they read online reviews of local businesses. 71% use Google for this, down from 83% the year before. The share using ChatGPT and other AI tools for local recommendations rose from 6% to 45% in the same survey.

Which directories an AI assistant draws on for its answer cannot be reliably checked from the outside. What you can control is the data: if Google, Bing, Apple and the large business directories show the same details, there is no conflicting version for an AI to pick up.

Measurement

You can track directory work with five metrics:

• Listing coverage: share of your target directories with an active, verified listing.
• NAP consistency rate: share of listings that exactly match the master data sheet.
• Local visibility: position in the Local Pack and in Google Maps for your most important search terms and locations.
• Reviews: number, average rating and response rate per platform.
• Directory traffic: calls, direction requests and website clicks from your Google Business Profile, plus visits from directories in your web analytics. Add UTM parameters to the website links in your profiles so you can analyze them separately.

Check all listings at least every six months and immediately after a move, a new phone number or new opening hours. How to find duplicates and outdated listings is covered in the article on the citation audit.

Austria and Switzerland

If you also have locations in Austria or Switzerland, you need different listings there, in Austria for example WKO Firmen A-Z, which has no counterpart in Germany. The lists for those countries: Business Directories Austria and Business Directories Switzerland.