Claim your business listing
This directory starts from open data: your business may well be here without you having put it here, described by whatever OpenStreetMap says about it and nothing more. Proving the website is yours hands you back control of what appears.
What you get
Three things. The “Verified owner” mark on your listing, which tells visitors that what they are reading comes from you. An offer of 140 characters, shown prominently — “10% off when you pay in bitcoin”, for instance. And 400 characters to say what you accept, since when, and how it works at the till. That last one is the only place on this site where a business speaks in its own name.
What it costs: nothing, and no account
It is free and will stay free for those three things. There is no sign-up, no password, no email address to hand over: the proof itself is what identifies you, and you redo it in two seconds the day you want to change your text. No placement can be bought, and putting the badge up will not change where you appear in results — otherwise it would be a link exchange, not a proof.
How to prove it, in two minutes
Open your listing and expand “Is this your business?”. Two methods are waiting there, your choice, worth exactly the same. The badge: a snippet of HTML to paste into your footer, which shows a logo and links back to your listing. Or the tag: one line in the <head> of your home page, which nobody sees and which adds no link at all. Then give us the address of the page you put it on, and we will read it.
What is proven, and what is not
The proof is about control of the domain, never about owning the business. Whoever can put a file on thebusiness.com is, in practice, the business or the people who run its site: that is the same assumption Google Search Console makes, and it is worth what it is worth. We would rather write it down than let “Verified owner” promise more than it observes.
The proof is rechecked every night
It is never settled once and for all: an expired domain can be bought by someone else. Every night we read the page again. If your site is simply unreachable, or refuses to let us read it, nothing happens — we know nothing, and a week of downtime should cost you nothing. If the page is read and the proof is gone, three times running, the listing goes back to being anonymous. Your text stays in the database: it reappears exactly as it was as soon as the proof is found again.
Your text is reviewed before it appears
The offer and the message go past a human before they show up, including when you edit text that was already published. These are two free-text fields on a page we put our name to: a banned-words filter would stop insults and let through precisely what matters. Expect a short wait, not no wait.
If your business is not listed yet
It has to be here first. The quickest route is the submission form; the most durable is to add it to OpenStreetMap, where this directory gets its data — one entry then makes you visible here and on the other crypto maps. Claiming comes afterwards, once the listing is live.