Is Your Clinic Website AHPRA Compliant? How to Check Before Someone Else Does

Most clinics think of compliance as something that happens at accreditation time. But there is one document that is breaching the rules far more often than the manual ever does, and it is public, indexed by Google, and visible to every patient, competitor, and regulator who cares to look: your website.

AHPRA's advertising guidelines apply to everything that promotes a regulated health service, and a clinic website is advertising from the homepage to the footer. This is a plain-English guide to auditing your own site for the breaches that catch clinics out. It is general information, not legal advice. The AHPRA advertising guidelines are the source of truth.

Why the website is the high-risk document

A manual sits in a folder and gets read by your team and a surveyor. A website is read by everyone, all the time, and it stays up unchanged for years. That combination, high visibility plus low maintenance, is exactly why it drifts into breach. A page written when the rules were looser, a testimonial added by a well-meaning staff member, a "best in Brisbane" line that felt harmless: each one sits there quietly until someone notices.

And people do notice. Complaints to AHPRA about advertising often come from competitors, not patients. Your website is the easiest place for someone to find a breach and report it.

The breaches to check for

Walk your own site, page by page, and look for these:

• Testimonials about clinical care. Under the National Law you cannot use testimonials that recommend the clinical aspects of a regulated health service. A patient quote saying a treatment worked is a testimonial. Reviews embedded on your site, patient "success stories", and case studies that describe an outcome all fall in scope.
• Outcome and benefit claims. Anything that creates an unreasonable expectation of benefit, or implies a result you cannot reliably deliver for everyone, is a problem. "Patients leave pain-free" is a claim. So is a before-and-after framed as a typical result.
• Superlatives and comparisons. "Best", "leading", "number one", "safest", and comparisons to other practitioners are classic traps when they cannot be substantiated.
• Misleading or false statements. Claims about qualifications, success rates, or technology that cannot be backed up.
• Inducements without terms. Offers, discounts, or gifts that do not clearly state their terms and conditions.
• Using fear. Copy that pressures someone into a service by playing on fear of a health consequence.

For specific specialties the rules are tighter again. Cosmetic procedures, in particular, have their own additional advertising restrictions that go well beyond the general guidelines.

The nuance most people get wrong

Not every patient comment is a testimonial. AHPRA draws the line at the clinical aspects of care. Feedback about your reception staff, how easy the parking was, or how clearly something was explained is not a testimonial under the National Law and may be used. "The team were lovely and the clinic was easy to find" is fine. "The treatment fixed my condition" is not.

The hard part is that on a Google Business Profile you do not write the reviews, your patients do, and because the profile is advertising you control, you carry responsibility for managing it. That is a genuine grey area worth getting help with rather than guessing.

How to actually audit it

1. List every public page, including your Google Business Profile and social pages, not just the website.
2. Read each one as a regulator would, hunting specifically for the six breach types above.
3. Check the corners, footers, image captions, alt text, old blog posts, and landing pages you forgot existed. Breaches hide in the pages nobody maintains.
4. Fix and document. Remove or rewrite the offending copy and note what you changed and when, so you can show the site has been actively managed.

Where LUNA fits

Doing this by hand across a whole site is tedious and easy to get wrong, which is why we built a free website compliance check: it scans your live clinic site against the AHPRA advertising rules and gives you a plain-English report of what to change, before a complaint or a competitor finds it first. It is the one part of our practice compliance work with its own quick form, because it is free and we want you to have something useful before we ever speak.

The honest framing on what we do: we audit your site, flag the wording that puts you at risk, and tell you how to fix it. Whether a regulator agrees in any specific case is never something anyone can guarantee, so we are careful about that. What we can do is take the obvious breaches off your site so you are not the easy target. If you have not read your own website with the advertising rules in mind recently, that is the place to start, and the check will do most of the looking for you.