Before a new treatment page goes live, check the title and search description, the concern and process wording, the results and risk lines, any offers, any reviews, any product names, and anything embedded. Then ask your adviser to approve it. This checklist takes about ten minutes once you have done it a few times.
I wrote it because wording drifts when many people edit a site, and the person publishing a page is rarely the person who read the guidelines. Make it a short routine that whoever publishes must tick. It is a wording check, not legal advice.
Why use a checklist at all?
Because the mistakes are repetitive and a checklist catches repetitive mistakes. Our check looks for nine kinds of wording, and most real findings are the same few: a medicine name, a promise of a result, an offer, a review or a ranking claim. A person who has the list in front of them finds them.
The sources behind it are the Ahpra guidelines for advertising higher-risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures (2 September 2025), the Ahpra and Medical Board cosmetic surgery guidelines (2023), the TGA advertising rules and section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law. For the full background, see what the guidelines mean for your website.
What goes on the checklist?
- 1Title and search description. Read both. They are public text under your clinic's name.
- 2Social share description. The text shown when someone shares the link.
- 3Names. No prescription medicine names, direct or indirect, and no product brands for fillers or implants.
- 4Concern and process. The page describes the concern and the consultation, not a product.
- 5Results. No promise of an ideal result. 'Results vary from person to person.'
- 6Risk. No claim that a procedure is safe or without discomfort. 'All procedures carry risks.'
- 7Offers. No price cuts, add-ons at no charge or deadlines.
- 8Reviews. No patient reviews, ratings or praise quoted, including widgets.
- 9Ranking. No claim to be first or ahead of other clinics.
- 10Tone. Nothing that makes the reader feel bad about how they look.
- 11Embeds. Galleries, captions, banners and pop-ups checked as well as typed text.
- 12Approval. Your adviser has seen the final wording.
Twelve lines. Print them, put them in your publishing process, and have the person who clicks publish tick each one. If a line does not apply to a page, write 'not applicable' beside it, so a blank always means unchecked.
How do you check the parts people forget?
Read the structured data and the share description. Most people read only the visible text. Our check reads five layers of a page: the title, the search description, the share description, the structured data that Google reads and the page text. A phrase can sit in one of the hidden layers only.
Ask your web developer to show you the title, description and structured data of the new page. If you use a page builder, the fields are usually in a settings panel for the page. Check them with the same care as the headline.
What do you do with a page that fails?
- Medicine or product name: remove it, and name the concern or the procedure instead.
- Promise of a result: replace it with a plain line that results vary.
- Claim about safety: replace it with a plain line that all procedures carry risks.
- Offer or deadline: remove it.
- Review or rating: remove it, and link to an independent profile if you want.
- Ranking claim: say something specific and checkable, such as years in practice.
Those fixes are the ones the Ahpra check suggests. An award can stay if you state it factually: the body that gave it and the year.
Should you run the Ahpra check as well?
Yes, as a second pair of eyes. Enter your website and the Ahpra check reads up to 5 public pages and lists each phrase with the page it is on and suggested wording. It splits findings into likely and worth a look. The first findings show straight away, and the full list comes by email.
It has limits. It is a wording check, not legal advice, it can miss things and flag things that are fine, it reads text only, and five pages is not your whole site. It does not replace the checklist or your adviser. We keep the result so we can show it to you, and we do not collect patient information from your site.
Who should own the checklist?
One named person per clinic, with a backup. The checklist works when somebody is responsible for asking whether it was done, not when everybody assumes somebody else did. Put the owner's name at the top.
Review the list itself once or twice a year, because the guidelines get updated, and the non-surgical ones our check uses are the 2 September 2025 version. Tell the team when it changes.
Does the same list work for messages?
Almost. Drop the title and share description lines and keep the rest. A reminder or reply text should have no medicine names, no offers or deadlines, no reviews, no ranking claims and no promises about results, plus a STOP option. See what a reminder text can say.
If you would rather not apply the list yourself on every template, Conduit checks each message before it sends and your clinic approves it. To see that on your own clinic, book a 20-minute demo.