6 of 8 Maid Agency Sites Show Their MOM Licence

A family in Singapore decides on a maid agency the way they decide on a contractor: they look for proof that you are who you say you are. Every licensed employment agency in Singapore already holds a piece of proof that costs nothing to publish, and that no competitor can copy — its MOM licence number. On 28 September 2026 we measured how many agency websites actually show it.

6 of the 8 agency homepages we could read displayed an MOM employment agency licence number. Only 1 of the 8 showed any dollar figure. We started from four real buyer searches, kept the agency-owned sites, and measured ten of them. Two of the ten never let us see a page at all.

The gap is not effort. These sites are not thin or lazy — the median homepage in our sample ran past 1,800 words and every readable one served its text without JavaScript. The gap is that the industry publishes trust signals it chose, and withholds the two a buyer asks for: what it costs, and the number that proves the licence.

What we measured, and on which four searches

We ran four searches through SingRank's own SearXNG metasearch on 28 September 2026: "maid agency singapore", "best maid agency in singapore", "transfer maid agency singapore" and "maid agency yishun". All four are real phrases, not invented ones — each came back in Google Autocomplete when we expanded the seeds "maid agency" and "transfer maid" the same morning.

From each result list we kept the results that were about maid agencies in Singapore, then separated the agencies' own websites from third-party pages. We took ten agency-owned sites and ran our audit crawler over each homepage, plus one more page where a sitemap gave us one. We then read each readable homepage against five questions: does the opening say what the business does and that it is in Singapore, is a licence number shown, is any fee figure shown, is there a question heading or FAQ, and is there a clear way to enquire.

This page names no business. The counts describe ten websites on one morning.

Who holds page one for these searches

Across the four searches, 39 of the slots we kept were on-topic. Agencies' own websites held 21 of those 39. The other 18 went to somebody else: maid portals that list many agencies, "best of" articles, review sites, a business directory and one agency's Facebook page.

The split moved with the search. For "maid agency singapore" and "transfer maid agency singapore", agencies held 6 of 10 on-topic slots each. For "maid agency yishun" they held 4 of 9, with the top slot going to a review site and three more going to directories.

That is the shape of a town search in this industry. Somebody else has written the Yishun page, and a family searching Yishun reads their description of you before yours. Our guide to best-of lists and directories covers when paying for a listing is worth it and when it is not.

6 of 8 sites showed an MOM licence number

Six of the eight readable homepages printed at least one employment agency licence number in the format MOM issues, usually in the footer. Two printed none anywhere on the page.

Two of the six showed more than one number, which is what you expect from an agency running several licensed entities or branches. One of those listed three.

The two that showed none were not small or new — both had long homepages, both named a founding year in the 1980s or 1990s, and both declared an EmploymentAgency entity in their structured data. They simply never printed the number.

In our view that is the cheapest fix in this whole study. A licence number is a claim anyone can check, which is exactly what makes it worth more than the word "trusted". Our guide to SEO for maid agencies in Singapore argues the same thing from the buyer's side; this is the first time we have counted it.

Only 1 of 8 showed a dollar figure

One homepage of the eight carried any dollar amount. It showed an hourly rate and four monthly salary figures — and those salary figures are the helper's pay, not the agency's fee.

So on a strict reading, none of the eight answered "how much is the agency fee" on the homepage. One other site had a dedicated fees page in our two-page sample, titled for maid agency fees in 2026, running to roughly 2,500 words with an FAQ block. That page exists; the figure just is not on the front door.

Set that against what buyers type. When we expanded "maid agency" in Google Autocomplete that morning, 13 of the 50 suggestions we kept were about price or fees — "maid agency fee", "how much maid agency fee", "maid agency price", "what is maid agency fee". Price was the single largest group. We read the buyer side properly in the companion piece to this study: only 1 of 33 helper searches mentioned an agency.

Across Singapore service websites generally, we have measured 99 of 211 showing a price. Maid agencies, on this small sample, sit well below that. There is a real reason: what a family pays to employ a helper is made of several parts, and the agency's own service fee is only one line of it. But "the total is complicated" is an argument for publishing your line of it, not for publishing nothing.

Every readable site opened by saying what it does

All eight readable homepages opened with body text that said what the business does, inside the first 120 words. That is far better than the 65 of 109 local pages we found in our AI search readiness study for Singapore in September.

One detail is worth pulling out. On three of the eight, the opening sentence we were shown did not contain the word Singapore. It named the business, the year it started, and the countries helpers come from, and left the buyer's country implied. For a business whose whole market is one city, that is a word missing rather than a paragraph missing.

Seven of the eight had at least one heading phrased as a question or an FAQ block, again ahead of the 57 of 109 in the readiness study. All eight showed a phone number, a WhatsApp link or an enquiry form without scrolling far. This industry does not have an answer-first problem.

2 of 10 sites served a challenge page, and hid their robots.txt with it

Two of the ten sites never returned a page. Both answered with HTTP 202 and a 169-byte document whose only content was a meta refresh to a path under /.well-known/sgcaptcha/ — a security challenge sitting in front of the site.

We tried three different clients: our audit crawler, a plain command-line request, and a request carrying a current desktop browser user agent. All three got the challenge. Then we asked for /robots.txt on both sites and got the same challenge page instead of a robots file.

That last part is the one that matters. A crawler that cannot read robots.txt has no instructions at all, and a search or AI system that cannot read the homepage has nothing to quote. Both of these sites appeared in the first ten results for "best maid agency in singapore" in our sample, so whatever is ranking them was fetched at some earlier point, through some other path. We cannot tell from outside whether this is deliberate bot protection, a rule tuned too tightly, or a temporary state. We can tell that on 28 September 2026, from our address, three clients in a row saw a challenge. If that might be you, the check takes a minute: check the crawler gets in before you buy AI visibility.

The eight sites we could read were all open at the door. Every one returned a robots.txt with HTTP 200, and not one of the eight named GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot. None carried a site-wide block under User-agent: *.

The schema most sites had, and the one type that fits an agency

Six of the eight readable homepages declared some kind of business entity in their structured data. Two declared none — their markup covered the page and the site, with an Article and a Person on one of them, but no business.

Only three of the eight used the type built for this trade. schema.org defines EmploymentAgency as "An employment agency", a subtype of LocalBusiness, and it inherits everything LocalBusiness carries: address, opening hours, telephone, area served. Of the rest, one used LocalBusiness, one used ProfessionalService, and one used Organization with a Place.

Using Organization where EmploymentAgency fits is not an error that breaks anything. It is a missed chance to state, in machine-readable form, the one fact the whole business rests on. Our guide to schema markup for AI search covers the properties worth filling in.

Two more technical readings, for completeness. Raw server response time across the eight ran from 106 ms to 8,138 ms; three were under the 1,500 ms we aim for and three were over 4,000 ms. Seven of the eight gave our crawler a readable sitemap, between 11 and 96 URLs; the eighth declared a sitemap in robots.txt but returned no URLs to us.

What MOM already publishes about your agency

Singapore already has a neutral place where families can compare agencies, and most agency websites act as though it does not exist. MOM's Employment Agencies Directory lets an employer, in MOM's own words, "find employment agencies that match your needs, check the agencies' service quality and performance, and shortlist and compare different employment agencies" (MOM, Employment agencies and personnel search).

Buyers know. Two of the 50 suggestions in our "maid agency" expansion were "maid agency review mom" and "maid agency review reddit" — the regulator and a forum, not your testimonials page.

One thing we could not do: read that directory. On 28 September 2026 a plain HTTP request to it returned HTTP 403 from a security layer, and a second client received a page whose visible text was a loading message. A person with a browser may well open it without trouble, and we did not test how AI crawlers are treated. But if the neutral scoreboard is hard for machines to read, the pages that quote it become more important, not less.

This is marketing guidance, not legal or professional advice. Check any statement about licensing or fees against MOM's own pages before you publish it.

What we would fix first

Four things, in this order, none of them needing a developer.

• Print the licence number where a buyer looks. Footer and contact page at minimum, and in the opening section of your main page. If you hold several licences, list them and say which entity does what.
• Publish your agency fee, or the range and what moves it. One line under a question heading: what your service fee is, what it includes, and which costs sit outside it. One of the eight sites already had that content on a separate page — it simply was not on the homepage.
• Add the word Singapore to the first sentence. Three of eight openings implied it. If your page will be quoted by a machine, the quoted sentence should say where you operate.
• Check what a bot sees. Open your own /robots.txt in a browser with the cache off, then fetch your homepage from a tool rather than a browser. If either returns a challenge, ask your host what triggered it.

Then declare EmploymentAgency in your structured data, with the address and telephone that match the footer.

What this costs you

Publishing a fee costs you the freedom to quote each family differently after you have heard what they can pay. That is a real loss and we will not pretend otherwise. The trade is that families who would have filtered you out on silence stay on the page, and the ones who cannot afford you leave before you spend an hour on them.

Printing the licence number costs nothing except the reminder that a buyer can now check you against a public record. If your record is weak, a website is the wrong thing to fix first.

The rest is a morning of editing. There is nothing here that justifies a rebuild, and if an agency has quoted you for a new site on the strength of these gaps, ask them which of the four items above needs new code.

Method and limits — read these before quoting

• Metasearch is not Google. Results came from SingRank's self-hosted SearXNG on 28 September 2026. Six of its engines returned errors that morning, so the lists we kept came mainly from Yandex and mwmbl. This is not Google's ranking and not the Maps pack.
• Small sample, one morning. Four searches, 39 on-topic slots, 10 agency websites, 8 of them readable. A single site changes a count by 12 percentage points.
• Homepages, mostly. We sampled one or two pages per site. A fee shown deeper in a site would not appear in our counts, and we say where we know that happened.
• PageSpeed and link checking were switched off to keep the audit inside its time limit, so no field speed data and no broken-link counts here.
• The five on-page readings were made by a reading pass over the fetched page, not by a human opening each site in a browser. Where the evidence quoted back to us was thin, we have said so rather than rounding it up.
• We did not test AI crawler user agents against any site, including MOM's directory. Our robots.txt reading tells you what the file says, not what a firewall does. No SingRank client is a maid agency, so no result needed replacing.

Our method page sets out how we separate findings from assumptions, and our research index lists the other counts with their samples and dates.

Send us the page that should win "maid agency singapore"

Send us the one page you want found for your trade and town. We will run these same checks on it — licence number, fee, opening sentence, question headings, schema type, robots and challenge pages — and tell you what to fix first. It starts as a free visibility check through our contact page, and our SEO, AEO and GEO programme starts from S$500/month if you want us to do the work.

What we will not promise is a ranking or an AI citation. AI platforms choose their own answers.

These findings describe ten websites sampled on 28 September 2026 through metasearch and direct fetches. This page names no business and is not a rating of any company.

FAQ

Do Singapore maid agencies have to show their licence number on their website?

Treat that as a question for MOM or your own adviser rather than for us; we measured practice, not obligation. What we can say is that 6 of the 8 agency homepages we could read on 28 September 2026 showed at least one licence number, so it is already the norm in this sample.

Why does a licence number help with search and AI answers?

Because it is checkable. A licence number ties your page to a public record, which is the kind of specific, verifiable detail that both a cautious family and a machine summarising your page can use. Adjectives like trusted or leading appeared on nearly every site we read and separate nobody.

Should a maid agency publish its fees online?

In our view, yes — at least a starting figure and what sits outside it. Price was the largest group in our autocomplete expansion, 13 of 50 suggestions. Only 1 of the 8 homepages we read showed any dollar amount, and that one showed salaries rather than an agency fee.

What is the right schema type for a maid agency?

EmploymentAgency. schema.org defines it as "An employment agency" and makes it a subtype of LocalBusiness, so it carries address, telephone, opening hours and area served. Three of the eight sites we read used it; two declared no business entity at all.

Our website is behind bot protection. Is that a problem?

It can be. Two of the ten sites in our sample returned a challenge page to three different clients, including one carrying a normal browser user agent, and the same challenge replaced their robots.txt. A crawler in that position has no page to read and no instructions to follow. Ask your host what the rule is.

Can I cite these figures?

Yes. Please cite "SingRank, maid agency website study, 28 September 2026" with a link to this page, and quote each count with its base, such as 6 of 8. Note the metasearch caveat and the sample size. Corrections are welcome through our contact page.