Impressum Scraper - German Company Imprint (GmbH, HRB, VAT)

Impressum scraper for sales teams, KYC and onboarding teams, data providers and researchers who need legal entity data for a list of companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Give it company websites and you get one row per company with what its legally required imprint (Impressum) publishes: legal name and legal form (GmbH, UG, AG, KG, GmbH & Co. KG, e.K., e.U., SARL ...), managing directors with their role, register court and number (HRB/HRA, FN, CHE), VAT id (USt-IdNr), postal address, phone, fax, email and the person responsible for the content, with the page it was read from. It finds the imprint page for you (home page links, then the usual paths, then the sitemap), also in French (mentions légales) and Italian (note legali).

It takes your list the way you have it: paste domains, give it a link to a CSV file, or hand it another Actor's dataset (for example Google Maps Scraper results with a website field), and turn on change mode to run it on a schedule and hear only about companies whose legal data changed (new managing director, new address, new VAT id).

Pay-per-result: $0.006 per company where a legal entity is found - 1,000 companies = $6. Sites with no imprint, no legal entity, blocked, unreachable or disallowing reading in robots.txt are delivered with a clear status and are never charged.

Impressum scraper quick start (1 minute)

1. Open the Input tab and paste company domains or website URLs (one per line, or a whole column at once).
2. Click Start, then export the dataset to CSV/Excel/JSON or pull it through the API shown below.

{
  "websites": ["heise.de", "golem.de", "spiegel.de"],
  "maxPagesPerSite": 4,
  "maxItems": 100
}

That prefilled example reads three company sites, up to four pages each at one page per second, and costs at most $0.018 (only companies where a legal entity is found are charged). A URL with a path works too ("https://www.example-firma.de/rechtliches/impressum"): it is read as the first extra page after the home page.

What you get

Field	What it holds
legalName, legalForm	The company name as the imprint prints it, e.g. Musterbau GmbH & Co. KG, and its form normalised to one spelling, e.g. GmbH & Co. KG
managingDirectors	[{name, role}]: Geschäftsführer, Vorstand, Inhaber, Verwaltungsrat, gérant, Managing Director ..., names and roles as published
registerCourt, registerType, registerNumber	Amtsgericht München, HRB, HRB 123456; Austria FN 123456a with Handelsgericht Wien; Switzerland CHE-123.456.789; France RCS Paris B 123 456 789
vatId	USt-IdNr / UID / TVA / P.IVA validated by format: DE + 9 digits, ATU + 8 digits, CHE-123.456.789 MWST, FR + 11, IT + 11
address	{street, postalCode, city, country} of the legal entity
phone, fax, email	Exactly as the imprint prints them (an "info [at] firma [dot] de" spelling is written as the address it spells)
responsibleForContent	The V.i.S.d.P. / "Verantwortlich nach § 18 MStV" / directeur de la publication person
imprintUrl, confidence, notes	The page it was read from, high / medium / low, and anything worth knowing
status, statusReason	ok, no-legal-entity, no-imprint-found, blocked, unreachable, robots-disallowed, and why

Nothing is guessed or enriched: every value is on the imprint page the row points to. Open imprintUrl to check any row.

Example output

{
  "inputUrl": "musterbau-beispiel.de",
  "domain": "musterbau-beispiel.de",
  "finalDomain": "musterbau-beispiel.de",
  "imprintUrl": "https://musterbau-beispiel.de/impressum",
  "status": "ok",
  "statusReason": null,
  "legalName": "Musterbau GmbH & Co. KG",
  "legalForm": "GmbH & Co. KG",
  "managingDirectors": [
    { "name": "Hans Muster", "role": "Geschäftsführer der Komplementärin" },
    { "name": "Greta Muster", "role": "Geschäftsführer der Komplementärin" }
  ],
  "registerCourt": "Amtsgericht Köln",
  "registerType": "HRA",
  "registerNumber": "HRA 4711",
  "vatId": "DE987654321",
  "address": { "street": "Am Beispielhafen 5", "postalCode": "50667", "city": "Köln", "country": "DE" },
  "phone": "0221 987654-0",
  "fax": "0221 987654-9",
  "email": "info@musterbau-beispiel.example",
  "responsibleForContent": null,
  "confidence": "high",
  "notes": "address country (DE) taken from the register or VAT id format, not printed on the page",
  "pagesCrawled": 2,
  "changedFields": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-10T12:00:00.000Z"
}

The company in this example is invented. A company with nothing to report comes back as a short row, e.g. "status": "no-imprint-found" with a statusReason, and no entity fields.

What it reads, and where

• Germany: the Impressum (§ 5 DDG / TMG, § 18 MStV): Firma and legal form, Vertretungsberechtigte, Registergericht and Registernummer (HRB, HRA, GnR, VR, PR), Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer, Telefon, Telefax, E-Mail, V.i.S.d.P.
• Austria: Impressum / Offenlegung (ECG, MedienG): Firmenbuchnummer (FN with its letter), Firmenbuchgericht (Handelsgericht, Landesgericht), UID (ATU), Geschäftsführer.
• Switzerland: Impressum: UID (CHE-xxx.xxx.xxx, with MWST/TVA/IVA as the VAT id), Handelsregisteramt, Verwaltungsrat or Geschäftsleitung.
• France and Italy: mentions légales (SARL, SAS, RCS, TVA intracommunautaire, gérant, directeur de la publication) and note legali (S.r.l., S.p.A., P.IVA, REA, amministratore).
• Legal forms: GmbH, gGmbH, UG (haftungsbeschränkt), AG, SE, KG, KGaA, OHG, GbR, eG, e.V., e.K., GmbH & Co. KG (and AG/UG/SE & Co. KG), PartG mbB, GesmbH, OG, KEG, e.U., SARL, SAS, SASU, EURL, SA, Sagl, S.r.l., S.p.A., S.n.c., B.V., N.V., Ltd, LLC, Inc.

How it finds the imprint page

At most four page requests per site by default (home page included; up to six):

1. The home page, and the imprint links on it: a footer link called "Impressum", "Imprint", "Legal notice", "Mentions légales", "Note legali", "Offenlegung" or "Anbieterkennzeichnung", under any path.
2. The usual paths: /impressum, /imprint (French sites start with /mentions-legales, Italian ones with /note-legali).
3. The sitemap (from robots.txt or /sitemap.xml), looking for an imprint page under an unusual path.
4. The remaining paths: /legal-notice, /impressum.html.

It stops at the first page that states a legal entity. A privacy policy, cookie page or terms page is never taken for an imprint, even when it names the controller with address and register number.

What counts as a legal entity (and is charged): a legal name that carries a legal form, plus at least one more fact from the same page: a register number, a VAT id, a named director or a postcode. A freelancer or sole proprietor with no legal form and no register entry (just a name and an address) is reported as no-legal-entity and not charged, and the row carries none of their details.

Enrich Google Maps results

Hand it the dataset of a Google Maps Scraper run (or any dataset with a website column) and you get a legal-entity row per business website, with the columns you pick copied into source so you can join the result back:

{
  "datasetId": "AbCdEf123456",
  "datasetPassthroughFields": ["title", "placeId"],
  "maxItems": 500
}

To chain it automatically, set datasetId to {{resource.defaultDatasetId}} in the Google Maps Scraper's Integrations tab. Rows without a website, and "websites" that are only a Google Maps, Facebook or Instagram link, are skipped and counted in the INPUT_REPORT record. Several branches with one website share one row (source.sourceRowCount says how many).

Track imprint changes on a schedule

Set onlyChangedSinceLastRun to true and put the task on a Schedule (monthly is plenty: imprints change rarely). The first run delivers every company and remembers its legal data; later runs deliver only companies where something changed and say what in changedFields (managingDirectors, address, vatId, register, legalName ...). Unchanged companies are not delivered and not charged. A site that was read before and is now down, blocked or without an imprint is not a change: its last known data is kept. Whitespace, capitalisation and phone punctuation changes are ignored.

Input

Input	Meaning
websites	Company domains or URLs; de-duplicated by domain; up to 5,000 per run. Required unless websitesFileUrl or datasetId is given
websitesFileUrl	A public https link to a .csv or .txt list (max 5 MB, 20,000 lines)
datasetId, datasetWebsiteField, datasetPassthroughFields	Read the websites of another Actor's dataset; copy chosen columns into source
maxPagesPerSite	1-6, default 4: page requests per site, home page included
maxItems	1-5,000, default 100: the most companies returned, and your cost cap
outputFormat	full (default) or compact (a much smaller row for AI agents)
onlyChangedSinceLastRun, stateStoreName	Change mode and the name of the store that remembers the last run

Entries that are not websites (a header cell, a free-mail address, localhost) are skipped and listed with their reason in the run status and in the INPUT_REPORT record of the key-value store. A bad entry never fails the run; only a list with nothing usable does.

Data protection

This Actor only reads what a company publishes itself on the legal notice of its own website, which the law requires it to publish. It respects robots.txt, does not log in, and does not look anything up outside the sites you list (VAT ids are checked by format, not against a register). Managing directors and the person responsible for the content are named individuals, so their names are personal data under the GDPR even though the company published them: you are responsible for having a lawful basis for your use of the data, for example for B2B due diligence, KYC or a documented legitimate-interest assessment, and for honouring deletion requests. Imprints of sole proprietors and freelancers often carry a private address; rows without a legal form carry no entity data at all. This is general information, not legal advice.

Use it as an API

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("lukehunter/impressum-scraper").call(
    run_input={"websites": ["heise.de", "golem.de"], "maxPagesPerSite": 4}
)

for company in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(company["domain"], company["status"], company["legalName"], company["registerNumber"], company["vatId"])

Or with one HTTP call that runs the Actor and returns the data:

curl -s -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/lukehunter~impressum-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"websites": ["heise.de", "golem.de"], "maxItems": 10}'

Use with AI agents (MCP)

This Actor works as a tool for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients through Apify's MCP server. The only input a call needs is websites.

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json), with your own token from Apify Console > Settings > API & Integrations:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify-imprint": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y", "mcp-remote",
        "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=lukehunter/impressum-scraper",
        "--header", "Authorization: Bearer ${APIFY_TOKEN}"
      ],
      "env": { "APIFY_TOKEN": "<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" }
    }
  }
}

Clients that support OAuth (Claude.ai, VS Code) can connect with just the URL https://mcp.apify.com?tools=lukehunter/impressum-scraper and sign in to Apify. Never paste a real token into a shared file or chat.

Example. You ask: "Who is the legal entity behind heise.de, and what is its register number and VAT id?" The agent calls the tool lukehunter--impressum-scraper with:

{
  "websites": ["heise.de"],
  "outputFormat": "compact",
  "maxItems": 5
}

outputFormat: "compact" returns a small row per company (legal name and form, directors, register, VAT id, a one-line address, phone, email and the imprint URL) so the result fits an agent's context. It is charged exactly like the default "full" output: $0.006 per company where a legal entity is found, nothing otherwise. Set maxItems to cap spend. The status and confidence fields tell the agent when to say "not found" or to open imprintUrl and check.

Pricing and cost control

Pay per result, and only for a result with a legal entity in it.

$0.006 per company where a legal entity is found - 1,000 companies = $6.

Companies with a legal entity	Cost
3	$0.018
100	$0.60
1,000	$6.00
5,000	$30.00

There is no charge for starting a run. One company is one charge. A row with status no-legal-entity, no-imprint-found, blocked, unreachable or robots-disallowed is delivered but not charged, and neither is an entry that is not a website, a duplicate domain or (in change mode) a company whose data did not change. Hard caps: maxItems is an upper bound on cost (at most maxItems x $0.006), at most five sites are read at a time, each site at about one request per second with a per-site time budget, and the Actor never delivers a charged row your run's maximum-cost setting cannot pay for.

Limitations

• It reads what the imprint publishes, nothing more. It does not look companies up in the Handelsregister, Firmenbuch or Zefix, does not check VAT ids in VIES (they are validated by format only), and does not guess or complete missing fields. A missing field is null.
• Rule-based extraction, not a guarantee. Imprints are free text. The common layouts (labelled lines, tables, definition lists, one-line imprints) are read; a very unusual layout can give a partial row (confidence low or medium) or no entity. Spot-check rows against imprintUrl before relying on them, especially for compliance use.
• Page budget. By default four pages per site (home page, then the likeliest imprint pages). An imprint under an unusual path that is not linked from the home page and not in the sitemap is not found: the row says no-imprint-found. Raise maxPagesPerSite to 6.
• No JavaScript rendering. An imprint that a script builds in the browser (some single-page apps), an imprint shown as an image, or an email protected by a script shows nothing in the page's HTML and is not read.
• One entity per row. If an imprint lists several companies (a group site), the first legal entity that carries the facts is returned. A Komplementär GmbH named as the legal representative is not listed as a person.
• Sole proprietors and freelancers without a legal form or register entry are not reported as legal entities (and not charged). Natural-person data is not output for them.
• Countries. Built for Germany, Austria and Switzerland; French and Italian formats are read too. Other countries' imprints work only where they follow the same shape (legal name with form, register number, VAT id).
• Sites can block automated requests. If a site answers HTTP 401/403/429, shows a bot check or refuses robots.txt, the row is blocked and nothing is charged. This Actor does not use proxies, rotate identities, solve CAPTCHAs, accept cookies or try to get around a block.
• robots.txt is respected for every website it reads, page by page. A disallowed imprint path is not read (reported in notes), and a site whose robots.txt disallows its home page is robots-disallowed. The one thing it is not applied to is downloading your own list file (websitesFileUrl), which is an input document.
• Dataset input (datasetId) must be one the account that starts this Actor can open (the default dataset of a run in the same account); at most 20,000 rows are read and 5,000 companies per run. It reads the website the row already has and never requests Google Maps or any other site named in the dataset except the companies' own websites.
• Speed: about one page per second per site and five sites at a time, so 1,000 sites take roughly 10-20 minutes.
• This is an independent tool, not affiliated with any company whose website it reads. You are responsible for using the collected data in line with the law and the sites' terms.

Use it from your code, Make, Zapier or n8n

Built for automated pipelines: small runs, stable field names, one row per item, and you pay only for rows actually delivered.

One API call that runs the Actor and returns the data (replace $APIFY_TOKEN with your token from Apify Console → Settings → Integrations):

curl -s -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/lukehunter~impressum-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"websites": ["heise.de", "spiegel.de", "zeit.de"], "maxPagesPerSite": 4, "maxItems": 20}'

JavaScript (npm i apify-client):

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor('lukehunter~impressum-scraper').call({
  "websites": [
    "heise.de",
    "spiegel.de",
    "zeit.de"
  ],
  "maxPagesPerSite": 4,
  "maxItems": 20
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Python (pip install apify-client):

import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient(os.environ['APIFY_TOKEN'])
run = client.actor('lukehunter~impressum-scraper').call(run_input={"websites": ["heise.de", "spiegel.de", "zeit.de"], "maxPagesPerSite": 4, "maxItems": 20})
items = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items().items

Schedules, webhooks and no-code tools: save your input as a Task, add a Schedule (e.g. hourly or daily), and attach a webhook or one of the Integrations tab's connectors (Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack) to push each run's results into your own system.

Only new items each run: set "onlyChangedSinceLastRun": true on a scheduled Task and every run after the first delivers, and charges for, only items it hasn't delivered before for that same input. That makes it a ready-made change feed.

Reliability: an automated test runs this Actor's parser against the live site every day, and failures are fixed fast.

Feedback: an honest rating on the Store page, good or bad, helps others decide if this Actor fits their needs. Missing a field or found a problem? Open an issue on the Actor page.

FAQ

What is an Impressum and why does every German company website have one?

German, Austrian and Swiss law (for example § 5 DDG and § 18 MStV in Germany) requires commercial websites to publish who runs them: the legal name and form, address, a way to contact them, the register entry and VAT id where there is one, and who is responsible for the content. That makes the imprint a reliable public source of legal entity data, and this Impressum scraper reads it for you.

Is it the same as a Handelsregister lookup?

No. It reads what the company itself prints on its website. It does not query the Handelsregister, Firmenbuch or Zefix, so it cannot tell you whether the entry is current. It does give you the register court and number you would need to look the company up there.

Why was a company not charged?

Only status ok is charged: a legal name with a legal form plus a register number, VAT id, director or postcode on a real imprint page. no-legal-entity (an imprint with no complete entity, for example a freelancer), no-imprint-found, blocked, unreachable and robots-disallowed are free, and say why in statusReason.

Does it work for companies outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland?

French mentions légales and Italian note legali are read. For other countries it works where the imprint has the same shape; otherwise the row says no-legal-entity or no-imprint-found, free of charge.

Why is address.country set when the page does not print a country?

When the page prints none, the country is derived from the register or VAT id format (an HRB number or a DE VAT id means Germany). notes says so when that happened.

Are VAT ids verified?

They are validated by format (DE + 9 digits, ATU + 8, CHE-123.456.789 MWST, FR + 11, IT + 11) and written without spaces. They are not looked up in VIES.

Can I just give it a domain?

Yes. Give it heise.de, www.heise.de or https://www.heise.de/impressum; all of them work, and the first two are found through the home page and the usual paths.

How do I only get companies whose legal data changed?

Set onlyChangedSinceLastRun to true and run the task on a Schedule. The first run delivers everything; later runs deliver only changes, with changedFields.

Does it respect robots.txt?

Yes, for every page it requests. See Limitations.

How do I join the results back to my Google Maps rows?

Use datasetId with datasetPassthroughFields (for example ["title", "placeId"]): each result carries a source object with those columns.

Related Actors

Other data tools from the same developer, built to the same standard: official or public sources, hard cost caps, and honest documentation of limits.

• Domain Email Provider Lookup: the email provider (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoho and more), MX, SPF and DMARC setup of any domain list, with provider-change alerts.
• French Company Leads: French companies (entreprises) from the official Sirene-based API, filtered by NAF code, department, headcount and creation date, with SIREN/SIRET, officers and new-company alerts.
• Poland KRS Company Lookup: Polish companies from the official KRS API by KRS number: NIP, REGON, address, share capital, PKD and the board as published, with optional VAT status.
• Website Contact Scraper: emails, phone numbers and social profile links from any list of company domains, with the page each came from and a changed-contacts-only mode for scheduled runs.
• Website Tech Stack Detector: the technologies a website runs (CMS, ecommerce platform, analytics, ad pixels, chat, payments, CDN, frameworks) from its home page, with the evidence for each match and a changed-technologies-only mode for scheduled runs.
• Google Maps Email Extractor & Lead Enricher: emails, phones, social links, named people and the tech stack of every business in your Google Maps Scraper results, one enriched row per business, with filters such as only Shopify stores with an email.
• Federal Register Rule Effective-Date Radar: final federal rules about to take effect, with citations, dockets and urgency.
• UK Tenders Monitor: new UK public-sector tenders from Contracts Finder and Find a Tender, filtered by CPV code, value, region and buyer, with Slack, Discord and Telegram alerts.