What AHPRA's advertising rules mean for your website
Your practice website is advertising under the National Law. What AHPRA's rules prohibit, who is responsible, and how to check your own site.
A physiotherapy practice in the suburbs has a website written by a web designer in 2021. The hero banner promises “guaranteed relief”. A widget streams in Google reviews, several of which describe recoveries in detail. The about page calls the principal a “specialist in sports injuries”. Nobody at the practice has read the site as a regulator would, because nobody at the practice thinks of the site as advertising.
The National Law does. If a website promotes a regulated health service and seeks to attract patients to it, it is advertising, and section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law applies to every word of it. That is not an interpretation; it is how AHPRA’s own advertising guidelines define the term, and the definition explicitly includes websites and social media. This applies across every AHPRA-regulated profession, from medicine and dentistry to psychology, physiotherapy, and Chinese medicine.
The stakes changed recently. In 2022 the National Law was amended to lift the maximum penalty for an advertising offence from $5,000 to $60,000 per offence for an individual, and from $10,000 to $120,000 for a body corporate. As of July 2024 those penalties apply in every jurisdiction, including Western Australia. Each breach is a separate criminal offence, and registered practitioners can face disciplinary action on top.
The five prohibitions
Section 133 says advertising for a regulated health service must not do five things. All five figures and definitions below come from the regulator: AHPRA’s Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service, in effect since December 2020.
It must not be false, misleading or deceptive. This covers more than outright lies. Claiming a treatment is effective for a list of conditions without acceptable evidence, implying superiority over other providers, and understating risk all qualify. So does misleading by omission: partial information can breach even where every individual sentence is true.
It must not offer a gift, discount or inducement without stating the terms. A “free initial consultation” with no conditions, expiry or eligibility stated is the classic breach. AHPRA’s position is that the public reads “free” as absolutely free; if the cost is recouped elsewhere, the offer is misleading. Stating an instalment amount without the total cost fails the same test.
It must not use testimonials. More on this below, because it is the rule practices most often get wrong in both directions.
It must not create an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment. Words like “safe”, “pain-free”, “guaranteed” and “cure” used without acknowledging risk sit here, along with before-and-after photos presented as typical results.
It must not encourage indiscriminate or unnecessary use of health services. Urgency tied to health suffering (“don’t delay, your pain will only get worse”) and encouraging routine attendance with no clinical indication are the common forms.
Alongside section 133 sit the title rules. “Specialist” and its variants are restricted to practitioners holding specialist registration. Under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (Surgeons) Amendment Act 2023, “surgeon” is a protected title restricted to specialists in surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, or ophthalmology, and AHPRA expects all other references to “surgeon” removed from advertising, websites included. And a practitioner who is not a medical practitioner can use “Dr”, but the guidelines expect the profession to be made clear: “Dr Lee (Osteopath)”, not a bare “Dr Lee”. Each of these three title rules has its own edge cases; the full walkthrough is who can use the titles ‘Dr’, ‘Specialist’, and ‘Surgeon’.
The testimonial rule is narrower than most practices think
Practices tend to make one of two mistakes with testimonials. Some publish glowing patient stories about recoveries, which is squarely prohibited. Others, having heard about the ban, strip every review from their site, which is unnecessary.
The prohibition covers testimonials used in advertising that refer to clinical aspects of care: the symptom or reason for seeking treatment, the diagnosis or treatment provided, the outcome, or the practitioner’s skill or experience. A review that says “my sciatica was gone after three sessions” is a testimonial. A review that says “friendly reception, easy parking, always on time” is not, and AHPRA’s guidance says so explicitly.
Control is the other half of the rule. You are responsible for testimonials on platforms you control, which includes review widgets you choose to embed on your own site. You are not responsible for what patients post on independent review platforms, and you are not required to hunt those reviews down. But the moment you republish one on your website, you have used it in advertising. The review widget question, with worked examples of which reviews cross the line, gets a full treatment in can you show Google reviews on your health practice website.
Who is responsible
The advertiser is whoever controls the content: whoever publishes it, authorises it, or can modify or remove it. The guidelines are direct on this point, and it catches the situation most practices are actually in. If a marketing agency wrote your website, you are still the advertiser, and AHPRA expects you to check content produced on your behalf. “The web designer wrote it” is not a defence.
How to read your own site
The practical exercise is to read every public page the way a regulator would, asking four questions of each claim. Is there acceptable evidence for it? Does any offer state its full terms? Does any quoted patient comment touch a clinical aspect? Does any title or qualification imply more than is held? The pages where breaches concentrate are rarely the homepage: testimonial and review pages, service pages listing conditions treated, and fee pages carrying offers are where most of the risk lives. Psychology practices carry an extra layer of risk around endorsement titles; the profession-specific read-through is AHPRA advertising rules for psychologist websites.
We built a free tool that does a first pass of this reading for you. Submit your practice website and it reviews up to five pages against the advertising guidelines, quotes the exact wording it flags, cites the relevant section, and emails you the report. It is general information rather than legal advice, and a clean result is not a compliance guarantee; for advice on your obligations, your indemnity insurer or lawyer is the right door. But it will tell you in a few minutes whether your site has the obvious problems, which is more than most practices currently know. Check your website here.
This sits alongside the confidential AI work we do for professional services practices: the same discipline of building AI that respects the rules a regulated profession actually operates under. If your practice is weighing up AI more broadly, start with a conversation.