The WhatsApp green tick: what it is, and what it is not available for

The green tick is Official Business Account status, and the first thing to say is that Meta does not call it green. Its documentation says these numbers “have a blue checkmark beside their name in the contacts view”. The second thing to say is that you can request it, and that a whole category of number is excluded by name: the WhatsApp Business app.

Three terms that are not the same thing

Keeping these three apart is the whole of the subject. Meta keeps them in three documents: the badge, one of its prerequisites, and a separate decision about your name.

Meta’s term	What it is
Official Business Account	A status on one business phone number. Meta defines it as “a business phone number owned by a business that has been verified as an authentic business according to specific criteria”
Business verification	A decision about the business portfolio that owns the number, and one of the five OBA criteria: “The business portfolio that owns the number has been verified through Business Verification”
Display name approval	A decision about the name you registered, which governs where that name appears: “It can also appear at the top of individual chat threads and the chat list if your business phone number is approved via display name verification”

You can hold either of the last two without the first. Only the first is the badge.

What Meta says the badge is

The Official Business Accounts document opens with the definition and the mark:

An Official Business Account (“OBA”) is a business phone number owned by a business that has been verified as an authentic business according to specific criteria. Official Business Account business phone numbers have a blue checkmark beside their name in the contacts view.

The word “green” appears nowhere on that page. If you are reading a vendor page that promises a green tick, it is describing a badge Meta documents in another colour.

Whether you can request it

You can, and this is the part that is easy to get right. Meta writes that “You can request OBA status for a business phone number using WhatsApp Manager or API”, and describes the outcome as a notification: “Once we’ve reviewed your request, you will receive a notification letting you know if your business phone has been granted OBA Number status or not.”

Two limits sit beside that. Rejection carries a waiting period, stated twice on the page: “If your request is rejected, you can submit a new request after 30 days.” And one sentence rules out the app entirely:

We do not grant OBA status to business employees, test accounts, and WhatsApp Business app phone numbers.

If you answer customers in the WhatsApp Business app on a phone, that is the end of the enquiry, at any volume and with any paperwork.

The eligibility criteria Meta publishes

Five, in Meta’s order, on the Official Business Accounts page:

• “The business must comply with the WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy”
• “The business must be registered on the WhatsApp Business Platform for at least 30 days”
• “The business portfolio that owns the number has been verified through Business Verification”
• “The business phone number has enabled two-step verification”
• “The business phone number’s display name has been approved”

Notice what is not there. No revenue floor, no message volume, no employee count, no press coverage, no follower requirement. Meta’s phrase for the standard is “specific criteria”, linked to that list, and the list is the whole of what it publishes. Any threshold you have been quoted for the green tick is somebody’s inference, and we will not repeat one.

Meta also says that meeting the list does not guarantee the option to apply appears. If it does not, the instruction is to “reach out to your Meta point-of-contact, Solution Provider support, or Meta Support to check if you are eligible for the application process.”

On a refusal, the page is blunt and unspecific: “If your request has been denied, it means our team has reviewed your account and determined that it does not meet the eligibility requirements at this time.” No reason, no appeal route, and another 30-day wait. The consolation Meta offers is that the decision “does not limit your ability to share your business details”, and that the business profile fields are “fields that you can edit at any time.”

Business verification, the third criterion, is about the business rather than the number. The partner-led version of it is documented as a document upload with a two-value outcome, “Indicates the client’s business has been verified” or “Indicates Meta is unable to verify the client’s business based on the submitted business information”. Businesses that fail it three times through a partner are sent to do it themselves.

What the badge changes

The OBA page names two effects, and both are about visibility rather than reach or price. The badge is about being findable:

If a business phone number is not an Official Business Account (OBA), it will not appear in search results when users search for it within the WhatsApp application. However, if a user adds the number to their contacts, the display name will appear in their search results.

Where your name shows inside a chat is the other decision, and it is not this page’s. How display name approval gets triggered, which API field carries its outcome, how often a name can be changed and what holding the badge costs you there are all in the WhatsApp Business display name.

Nothing on the pages cited here ties the badge to pricing, to messaging limits or to quality rating, and we will not claim that it moves any of them.

What we could not verify

Meta’s Business Help Center articles on Business Verification and on the display name guidelines are the two pages this subject most needs, and both are rendered by script: we fetched each one and extracted under a hundred characters of text from either. We cannot save a copy, so we will not quote them. That means we cannot tell you which documents Business Verification accepts, or how long an OBA review takes, from a page we can show you. Neither is in the developer documentation cited here.

The answer

If your number is on the WhatsApp Business app, you cannot get the green tick, and no agency can get it for you. What that app does market is a different badge: “Your Meta Verified checkmark badge shows the world you are who you say you are and signals your business is authenticated by Meta”. That page publishes neither a price for it nor an eligibility rule, so we cannot tell you what it costs or whether you would qualify. If your number is on the Business Platform, work the published list, expect the apply option to be missing until Meta decides otherwise, and read a denial as what the page says it is.

Checking a vendor’s claim against the platform’s own documentation is the same exercise as choosing review management software.