Iberdrola’s Curenergía page asked to remain hidden in Internet searches for last-resort marketers The failure was corrected this Tuesday afternoon without the company offering an explanation A lawyer warned of the error on Twitter and the ministry issued a statement recalling that access to the regulated tariffs it has to be “without obstacles or obstacles” “If you are not in Google, it is as if you did not exist”. It is hard to believe that a multinational does not follow this 21st century mantra to the letter. But in the case of Iberdrola it seems that this far from small detail has escaped them (at least for a few days) in a very particular part of its business: the one that forces it to offer regulated rates for electricity and gas to its customers. The brand under which Iberdrola markets these prices is called Curenergía and has its own separate website. In its day, the competition authorities forced energy companies to create new brands so that customers could distinguish whether they contracted energy in the free or regulated market. This Tuesday morning there was no way to reach the Curenergía website with an internet search. Access to this page and the information on regulated energy rates simply did not appear in the Google results. The alert was launched in the morning by a lawyer, Samuel Parra, on the social network Twitter. He caught him trying to change rates. “I was with Iberdrola in the free market and I wanted to switch to the regulated gas company, which in my case is three times cheaper,” he explains in a message. He was surprised not to find the web in a simple search with the word: ‘Curenergía’.” I knew that the companies were putting obstacles to change you to the regulated gas rate, but this one surprised me because it was directly like: we are going to disappear from Google and so people can’t find us and therefore we make it very difficult for them to change rates,” he explains. Do you know what @iberdrola has done so that consumers do not find the Curenergia website (its regulated electricity and GAS rate marketer) on Google and thus we cannot easily locate Curenergía’s contact details? 🔽— Samuel Parra ️️🇪🇺 (@Samuel_Parra) October 31, 2022 This lawyer specializing in IT matters realized that Iberdrola’s Curenergía page was programmed to ask search engines to pass by, so to speak. A kind of trip in the language of computers that in practice meant that it was not easy for a user to find the web. “The changes were introduced on October 27,” hacker Jaime Gómez-Obregón pointed out on Twitter. The Curenergía page has been around for a long time. It would make more sense to find this bug on a newly created website or one that is in the testing phase”, explains an expert to NIUS. “It seems very complicated to me to justify this error and also they would immediately detect a sharp drop in their traffic,” argues Parra. The ministry, without directly mentioning this anomaly, launched a statement on Twitter. “Energy marketers have the obligation to offer simple and affordable access to their clients, regardless of the rate they want to contract, without obstacles or obstacles and with total transparency,” he said from his official account. It was somewhat strange because Tuesday was a holiday and the statement seemed to be written ad hoc: it did not even appear in the ministry’s press releases. the Government pic.twitter.com/fMxlgW3szx— Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (@mitecogob) November 1, 2022 In the afternoon the error was already corrected in Curenergía. That order that was given to search robots to pass by was gone. There is no official Iberdrola version in this regard. The company does acknowledge that it is receiving 5,000 queries a day from customers who want to switch to the regulated gas rate (the TUR is cheaper for small consumers). “Contracts have increased and customers have had access,” they explain. The bulk of Iberdrola’s business is not in this regulated market (neither electricity nor gas). 87% of its clients have a free market contract, as reported by the company itself a few days ago.