Can You Name Your Clients on Your Website?
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"Trusted by leading brands, government agencies and multinational corporations." You have written a version of that sentence, or your web designer has. It is doing almost no work.
The reason is simple. Every competitor writes it too, so a buyer comparing five suppliers reads the same claim five times and learns nothing. The thing that would actually move her — the names — is sitting in your project folder, and you have probably decided you are not allowed to publish it.
In most Singapore cases, the law is not what is stopping you. Your contract is. Those are different problems with different fixes, and confusing them costs suppliers the best proof they own.
This morning we read ten Singapore event company homepages. Nine of the ten made a numeric claim about scale: between ten and thirty years in business, or from a thousand events up to more than five thousand. The full counts are in our study of those ten sites. Not one of those nine numbers can be checked by the person reading it.
Two pages in that sample did something different. One published its public liability cover as a figure per event. One listed named clients and venues against individual past projects. Those are the only claims in the set a procurement officer could take to a meeting.
The PDPA is probably not what stops you
Naming a company is not a personal data question at all. A company is not an individual, so Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act does not reach it.
Naming a person at that company is a personal data question, and here the Act is more permissive than most people assume. The PDPA defines "business contact information" as "an individual's name, position name or title, business telephone number, business address, business electronic mail address or business fax number and any other similar information about the individual, not provided by the individual solely for his or her personal purposes" (Personal Data Protection Act 2012, Singapore Statutes Online).
Then it carves that out. The Act states: "Except where business contact information is expressly mentioned, Parts 3, 4, 5, 6 and 6A do not apply to business contact information." Those are the Parts that carry the consent, notification, access and correction obligations most people have in mind when they say "we would need consent".
So "Ms Tan, Head of HR at a company we worked for" is, on the face of the Act, business contact information rather than protected personal data. A photograph of her at your event, or a quote about how she felt, starts to look like something else, and that is where you should take advice.
This is marketing guidance, not legal advice. Read the Act yourself, and if a contract or a government procurement term is in play, ask a lawyer.
What actually stops you is the document you signed
The real barrier is contractual, and it is usually one of four things.
A confidentiality clause that covers the existence of the engagement, not just its contents. A publicity or no-marketing clause that says you may not use the client's name or marks without written consent. Government and statutory board procurement terms, which frequently prohibit using the agency's name in promotional material. Or the client's own brand guidelines, which reserve logo use to their communications team.
None of those is a reason to give up on named proof. All of them are reasons to ask. The asking is the part suppliers skip, and it is cheap: most clients who are happy with the work will say yes to something, even if it is less than you wanted.
Four questions before you publish a client's name
Work through these in order. Stop at the first no.
- Does the contract permit it? Search the agreement for "publicity", "announcement", "marks", "confidential" and "name". If a clause requires written consent, that is your answer and your next step.
- Have you asked the named person, in writing, and kept the reply? An email saying "yes, happy for you to list us" is the whole process. Keep it with the project file, because the person who said yes will leave.
- Is what you are publishing true as at a stated date? A named project with a month and a year ages honestly. "Trusted by" with no date silently claims a relationship that may have ended in 2019.
- Would you be comfortable if the client read the page tomorrow? They will. The most expensive version of this mistake is a client discovering they have become a case study.
If you get a no at step one or two, do not publish the name. A supplier who leaks a client's identity has demonstrated exactly the thing a cautious buyer is screening for.
What to publish when you cannot name anyone
This is the part worth real effort, because most suppliers are in this position and almost all of them default to adjectives.
Describe the client precisely without identifying them. Not "a leading MNC" but "a 400-person engineering firm with two Singapore sites, annual townhall, 2025". Sector, headcount, scale, date. Specific enough to be useful, generic enough to be anonymous.
Publish the facts that are yours to publish. Your certifications, with a working link to the certificate. Your insurance cover as a figure. Your licence number where your trade has one. The platform you use for registration and whether it meets Singapore data protection requirements. None of that belongs to a client, so no permission is needed, and all of it can be checked.
One site in this morning's sample links to its own safety certificate as a PDF, and the link returns a 404. That is the worst of both outcomes: the page claims the certification and then fails to prove it on the one click a careful buyer makes. Test your proof links.
Date everything. When we counted proof on 60 agency pages selling AI-search work, not one showed dated evidence. A dated anonymous result beats an undated named one, because the date is the part a buyer can reason about.
Give the referee instead of the reference. If you may not publish the name, you can often still offer it. "We can put you in touch with two clients in your sector on request" moves the proof to a phone call, where no clause is broken.
What this costs you, including when we do it
Anonymous proof converts worse than a logo wall. We will not pretend otherwise. A named client your buyer recognises does work that no amount of careful description replicates, and choosing anonymity means accepting a weaker page.
We are in this position ourselves. SingRank does not name clients, and our client results page reports enquiry numbers from businesses we manage without saying who they are. That is a weaker piece of proof than naming them would be, and we know it. We publish it anyway because the alternative is either breaking confidence or publishing adjectives, and of the three bad options it is the least bad.
The second cost is effort. Writing "a 400-person engineering firm, two sites, annual townhall, 2025" takes longer than writing "leading MNC", and it has to be done per project rather than once in a header. Suppliers write the adjective because it is free.
The third cost is that some of this reduces your claims. If you have run 1,200 events and can only describe nine of them honestly, your page will look smaller than your competitor's. In our view it will also look more like a firm that keeps its word, which is the quality a buyer spending five figures is actually screening for. That is the same argument we make about any performance claim an owner cannot evidence.
One next step
Open your own website and count. How many claims on it could a buyer verify without asking you? If the answer is none, you have found your week's work, and it is writing rather than rebuilding.
If you would rather we did the counting, send us the page you would show a new client through our contact page. We will tell you which claims hold up, which read as filler, and what you could publish instead without asking anyone's permission. It starts as a free visibility check.
If you want the ongoing work, our SEO, AEO and GEO programme is S$750 a month with 20 articles a month, on a three-month minimum. What we will not do is promise you a ranking or an AI citation. Search engines and AI platforms choose their own answers.
This page is marketing guidance, not legal or professional advice. Statutory wording quoted above was read from Singapore Statutes Online on 2 November 2026. Check the current text and your own contracts before publishing a client's name.
FAQ
Can I name my clients on my website in Singapore?
Usually yes, if your contract allows it. A company's name is not personal data under the PDPA, and an individual's name and job title fall within "business contact information", which the Act excludes from Parts 3 to 6A. The barrier is normally a confidentiality or publicity clause, so read the agreement first.
Do I need consent to name a client contact by name?
Under the PDPA, business contact information sits outside the consent obligations in Parts 3 to 6A. That is the legal position, not the commercial one. Ask the person in writing anyway and keep the reply, because the relationship matters more than the minimum requirement.
What can I publish if my client will not let me use their name?
Describe them precisely without identifying them: sector, headcount, scale and the date. Then publish the proof that is yours rather than theirs — certifications with working links, insurance cover as a figure, a licence number. Offer a reference on request instead of a published name.
Are client logos on a website a PDPA issue?
No. A logo is a trade mark question and a contract question, not a personal data one. Permission to use the mark normally sits with the client's brand or communications team, and many reserve it explicitly.
Is an anonymous case study worth publishing at all?
Yes, if it is dated and specific. An undated named claim tells a buyer less than a dated anonymous one, because the date is the part she can reason about. When we counted 60 agency pages selling AI-search work, none showed dated evidence of any kind.