Under the rules our Ahpra check applies, patient reviews and testimonials about treatment cannot be used in health service advertising, and that includes Google reviews shown on your own site. The safe move is to take them off your pages and ads, and link to an independent review page instead.
This surprises many owners, because a review feels like the patient talking. I will explain why it still counts as your advertising, where reviews hide on a site, and what you can put in their place.
Why does a review on my own site count as my advertising?
Because you chose to publish it. Once a review sits on your page, in your widget or in your ad, it is part of what you are telling the public about your service. The check on this site states the rule as: patient reviews or testimonials about treatment, including Google reviews shown on your own site, cannot be used in health service advertising.
Our check cites section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law for several of its rules, next to the Ahpra cosmetic guidelines and the TGA advertising rules. I read the review rule the way our check does. I am not your lawyer, so if a review case is borderline, ask your adviser.
Where do reviews hide on a clinic site?
Almost never only where you expect. These are the places I would look first:
- A star rating or review widget on the homepage or footer
- A page that collects patient praise under a heading of its own
- Quotes on treatment pages
- Screenshots of messages in a gallery
- Captions that repeat what a patient said
- Search results descriptions and structured data that include a rating
The last one is easy to miss. A rating can be passed to Google in structured data that is invisible on the page. Our check reads that layer too, because crawlers can.
What about a Google reviews widget?
A widget that pulls Google reviews onto your page is the clearest example of the problem. It is the review feed sitting on your own site. Remove the widget from treatment pages, the homepage and anywhere else that markets the service.
You can still link to your Google profile, as our check suggests: take reviews off your own site and ads, and link to an independent review page. The difference is that the patient reads the reviews on someone else's platform, not inside your advertising.
What can you put in place of reviews?
Something specific and checkable that is about you, not a patient's experience. Years in practice, the qualifications of your practitioners, how a consultation works, what the patient should bring and what happens afterward are all useful and do not use a patient's voice.
- Practitioner details: who will see the patient, their registration and their training, stated factually.
- Process: what happens at the first visit, in order.
- Risk and expectations: 'All procedures carry risks. Your practitioner will explain them at your consultation.'
- A plain link: 'Find us on Google' pointing to your profile.
None of that needs a patient quote. It also tends to answer the questions people actually have.
Can staff or patients post reviews on our social pages?
A patient posting on their own account is different from you republishing it. The moment your clinic shares, pins or reposts a patient's words about treatment, it becomes your advertising again. I would not repost them, and I would not use them in paid ads or in message templates.
I do not know every edge case on social platforms, and I will not pretend to. If you want to keep something borderline, ask your adviser in writing first.
What about reviews in patient messages?
The same rule applies. A reminder text or an automatic reply is advertising-adjacent text under your clinic's name, so a quoted review does not belong in it. Conduit checks each message template for patient reviews and testimonials, along with medicine names, offers and promises of results, and your clinic approves each template before it sends.
If you want to know how a compliant reminder reads, see what a reminder text can say.
Does a patient's good experience have any place on the site?
The experience does, the quote does not. You can describe, in your own words, what a visit involves: how long the consultation is, who the patient meets, how questions are handled and how follow-up works. Those are facts about your service that a patient would otherwise have to guess.
I would also invest in the parts of the patient journey that people remember, such as how quickly an enquiry is answered and how clearly the next step is explained. A clinic that does those well gets talked about on independent platforms, which is where that conversation belongs. If an enquiry waits until morning, see what missed after-hours enquiries cost.
How do you clean reviews off a site?
- 1Search your own site for the words reviews, stars, rating and praise, and for the name of any review service you use.
- 2Check every embed, not just typed text.
- 3Remove widgets from treatment, price and offer pages first.
- 4Delete quote blocks and screenshot galleries.
- 5Check the search description and social share description of each page.
- 6Run the Ahpra check to confirm nothing remains, then show the result to your adviser.
The check is a wording check, not legal advice, and it reads public text only. If a review lives inside an image, you will have to find it by eye.