This is not legal advice, and nothing on this page should be treated as a statement of your rights. We are a register that publishes about small businesses, not a law firm, and we cannot act on your behalf. What follows is a practical escalation ladder: what to do first, what to do when that is ignored, and an honest account of the point at which the ladder runs out. Where the position depends on law, this page points you at our source ledger rather than telling you what the law says.
With that said, the situation itself is common and it is fixable more often than people expect. A page exists about your business. You never created it. The phone number is three years old, the opening hours are wrong, and there is a contact form on it that goes somewhere you have never seen.
What this is, and who it is for
This is for an operator who has found a listing about their business on a site they have no relationship with, and who wants it corrected or gone.
It helps to understand why the page exists at all, because that shapes how you should write to whoever runs it. Business contact details are compiled in bulk from public sources and other listings, and the resulting pages serve one of a small number of purposes: they are inventory that makes a category look populated, they are pages that attract searches for your name, or they are bait for you to come and confirm the details for free. That last one is the reason "claim this listing" buttons exist. Why the site listed you in the first place covers the underlying models, and sites that sell your enquiry rather than list you covers the specific case where the form on your page is routing your customers elsewhere.
None of this means the site is doing anything unlawful. It usually means nobody there has thought about you at all.
Before you write: what to record about the listing
Do this first and it will save you repeating work later. Whoever you eventually reach will ask for at least half of it, and if the listing changes while you are corresponding you will want a record of what it said.
- The exact address of the page. Copy it from the address bar, including anything after the question mark.
- A dated screenshot or saved copy of the full page. Include the header, so the site's own name is visible in the image. Note the date and time you captured it.
- Every detail that is wrong, written out as a list: wrong phone number, wrong address, wrong hours, wrong description of what you sell, a category you do not operate in.
- Anything that is right but that you do not want published. This matters more than people expect, particularly an address.
- How you found it. Searching your own business name is the usual route. Note what the page ranks for, because that is the real harm you are describing.
- Any form or phone number on the page that is not yours. If enquiries meant for you are being collected by someone else, say so explicitly in your request.
- The site's own name for itself, from the page header rather than from the address.
Keep all of this in one place. Every message you send should be able to stand alone.
Step 1: find the actual operator behind the site
Many listing sites are deliberately hard to contact, and many more are simply thinly staffed. Work through these in order and stop when you get a plausible route.
- The footer. Contact, about, legal, imprint, or an equivalent. Small sites often have a real address here that the contact form does not reach.
- The privacy notice. This is the most reliable page on any site for finding out who actually operates it, because it usually has to identify the operator and often gives a dedicated contact route for data questions. Read it even if you read nothing else.
- The terms page. Frequently names a company and a jurisdiction.
- Domain registration records. Often redacted for privacy, but not always, and the registrar itself is sometimes a route of last resort.
- The app or business-facing side. If there is an "advertise with us" or "for businesses" page, it will have a sales contact. A sales contact is often monitored more closely than a general support address, and can usually route your message internally.
- A named person. If the site publishes an author, an editor or a founder, a message to a person is answered more often than a message to a form.
Send to more than one route at once. Use the form and the email address. Nobody is offended by this and it materially raises the odds of a reply.
Step 2: the first request, and what to put in it
The first message should be short, specific, unambiguous about what you want, and easy to act on without a decision. It should not cite any law, threaten anything, or open a discussion. There are two reasons for that. The first is that a citation invites the request to be forwarded to someone who will take longer. The second is that you may not need it: removing one page costs the site almost nothing, so plenty of these requests are simply granted.
Here is a complete request you can copy. It asserts no legal right and makes no threat.
Subject: Removal request — listing for [business name]
Hello,
You publish a page about my business at [full address of the page].
I am the owner of [business name]. I did not create this listing and I have no account with your site. I am asking you to remove the page entirely.
For your records, the listing is also inaccurate. It shows [wrong detail], [wrong detail] and [wrong detail]. The contact details on it are not ones we use, so enquiries sent through the page do not reach us.
To confirm I am the operator, I can reply from an email address on our domain, or you can call the number published on our own website at [your address].
Please confirm once the page has been removed. If removal is not something you can do, please tell me who can.
Thank you, [Your name] [Your role, business name] [Your business website]
Send it from a business email address if you have one. Keep a copy. Note the date.
Two small variants are worth knowing. If you would rather the listing were corrected than removed, ask for that instead and supply the correct details in the same message, because a site that has to go looking for them will not. And if the only detail you truly need gone is an address, say that plainly and separately, because it is a smaller ask and gets a faster yes.
Step 3: the follow-up, and how long to wait
Wait a reasonable period before chasing. Long enough to be fair, short enough to keep the thread alive.
The follow-up should do three things: quote your original message in full underneath, restate the single action you want in one sentence, and state that you will escalate if you do not hear back. Do not add new arguments. Adding arguments makes the thread look like a negotiation, and you are not negotiating.
If you have had an auto-acknowledgement with a ticket number, use it in the subject line. If you have had nothing at all, try a different route from your step-one list rather than sending to the same address a second time.
Keep the tone flat throughout. Requests that read as angry get handled as complaints, and complaints go to a slower queue than requests.
Step 4: escalating within the platform
If two direct requests go unanswered, the remaining moves are all about finding a channel that has a person attached to it.
- The data or privacy contact. Most sites publish one, and it is frequently monitored by a different and more responsive part of the organisation than general support.
- The sales or partnerships contact. They want business inbound, so they read their mail. Ask them to route the request.
- A named individual. An editor, a founder, an account listed publicly on a professional network. One polite message, once.
- The host or registrar. Rarely useful for a removal request and sometimes counterproductive, but occasionally the only address that resolves to a human. Do not frame this as a complaint about content unless it genuinely is.
- Public but calm. A short, factual, unemotional public message asking a site to respond to a removal request sometimes works where private mail did not. Keep it free of accusation, because an accusation you cannot substantiate creates a new problem for you.
Whatever you do, keep everything in one thread and keep a record of every attempt with dates. If the matter ever goes further, that record is the whole of your position.
Where your options depend on where you are
This is where a practical guide has to stop being general, and where we will not guess.
Everything above is written as something you ask for, because that is what it is. Whether anybody is owed a removal anywhere is not a question this site answers. Nor is whether a listing about a business engages personal-data rules at all, who counts as the responsible party when a site is run in one country and read in another, whether a regulator would take an individual complaint about a listing, or what response any of that could be expected to produce. Those answers differ from place to place, and we are not going to summarise them here, because a confident summary that turns out not to apply to you is worse than no summary at all.
What we can say without asserting an outcome is this. For a sole trader, business contact details and personal contact details are often the same details. The phone number is a personal phone. The registered address may be a home. In that situation, a page about your business is also a page about you as a person, and saying so plainly changes what you are asking for. It is no longer a commercial correction. It is a request to take your own details off a page you did not put them on, which is something a stranger can act on without having to decide anything.
The practical takeaway is narrow and safe: if the listing includes a home address or a personal mobile number, say so explicitly in your request and ask for those specific items to be removed as a first priority. That request is understood everywhere, is cheap for a site to grant, and is the one most often granted quickly.
Anything beyond that, get advice from someone qualified in your jurisdiction. Primary sources we have opened and recorded are listed in our source ledger with the jurisdiction stated against each. If you are about to rely on a statement about your rights, take it from a named primary source there or from a professional, not from a page like this one.
When the listing will not come down, and what to do instead
Be prepared for this, because it happens often. Some sites do not answer. Some answer and decline. Some remove the page and it reappears at a new address six weeks later when the source data is re-imported. And for many of these sites there is no realistic enforcement route available to a small business, which is an uncomfortable thing to write in a how-to but is more useful than pretending otherwise.
If you reach that point, shift from removal to containment.
- Make your own page the better answer. The listing usually surfaces because someone searched your business name. If your own site is clear, current and obviously the primary source, most people who see both will use yours. The findability checklist covers what a stranger needs to see.
- Correct rather than remove. If they will not delete, ask them to fix the phone number and the address. A correct listing you did not want is much less harmful than an incorrect one.
- Kill the misrouted contact route. The worst part of a wrong listing is usually a phone number or form that intercepts your customers. Getting that one field changed is a smaller ask than removal and is often granted on its own.
- Say so where you can. A line on your own contact page stating which channels are actually yours costs nothing and resolves confusion for anyone who checks.
- Stop feeding it. Do not use a "claim this listing" flow unless you have decided you want the listing. Claiming it confirms your data and can convert a stale page into an accurate, permanent one.
- Keep the file. If the same site is still publishing wrong details about you a year later, the dated record you built at the start is what any adviser will ask for first.
How to stop it happening again
You cannot prevent bulk compilation. You can reduce how much of it lands on you.
- Decide what your published contact details are, and use them consistently everywhere. Scrapers copy what they find. If every public mention of you carries the same business number and the same trading address, that is what propagates.
- Never publish a home address as a business address if you can avoid it. Once it is in circulation it is extremely hard to withdraw. Which alternatives are open to you depends on your legal form and where you are, and that is a question for your accountant or another qualified adviser rather than for a page like this one.
- Search your own business name occasionally. Twice a year is enough to catch new listings while they are young, and a young listing is easier to have removed than one that has been there for years.
- Be deliberate about which listings you claim. Each claim is a set of confirmed, current details that will be copied onwards. That is a reason to claim the ones that help you and leave the rest alone.
- Keep your own site current, because it is the source that everything else is copied from and the one you control.
Our own removal process, for contrast
We publish about businesses too, so the same demand can be made of us, and it should be.
Removal from this register is free, requires no reason, requires no account and involves nobody trying to talk you out of it. You do not have to prove ownership beyond enough for us to be confident we are speaking to the operator. You can ask for the entry to be deleted, for a quote to be pulled, for a tombstone to come off, or to never be listed again, and the last of those is recorded and honoured. The route is request removal from our register.
No response-time claim is made because this article supplies no dated request log from which to calculate a median. If you want the shorter operational framework for details that changed rather than details you want gone, read how our removal process works.
In Plain English
What it means. A listing about your business that you never created can usually be removed or corrected by a short, specific, unemotional request sent to the right person. When that fails, the realistic goal shifts from deletion to containment.
Who it helps. Any operator, and particularly a sole trader whose business details are also personal details.
When to use it. As soon as you find the listing. Old listings are harder to move than new ones.
What to do next. Record the page and its errors today. Send the request in step two. Diarise a follow-up. And if the page contains a home address or a personal number, put that at the top of your request.
Using the letters on this page
All three letters are written out in full above and nowhere else: the first request in step two, the follow-up in step three, and the escalation in step four. Copy the one you need into your own mail client, swap in your business details and the page URL you recorded, and keep the sent copy with the screenshot. Free, with no email required and nothing to download. The rest of the background on how these sites operate is at how directories work.