An AHPRA compliance check is a deliberate read of everything you publish against the five grounds in section 133 of the National Law. Most Australian clinics have never run one. That is usually not carelessness. It is that non-compliant advertising is silent. Your website does not break. Google does not rank it lower. No patient mentions it. Nothing ever tells you to look. AHPRA is closing that gap from its own side. Its advertising compliance and enforcement strategy says it will ask practitioners to declare that their advertising meets the National Law. It will then audit against that declaration. The sample will be big enough to generalise to a whole profession. Declaring something is a different act from assuming it.
- Why does a clinic believe its marketing is compliant?
- What is AHPRA actually planning?
- What changes when you have to declare it?
- Is the regulator's workload actually growing?
- What if your agency wrote the page?
- What does "checked" actually mean?
- How do you run the check yourself?
- What this article is not
Why does a clinic believe its marketing is compliant?
Ask a practice owner whether their website complies with the AHPRA advertising rules and you will almost always get a yes. Ask when they last checked, and the answer changes shape. It becomes a story about who built the site, and when.
The belief is honest. It is also unearned, and there is a structural reason for it.
Everything else that goes wrong on a website tells you. A broken page returns an error. A slow page shows up in Google's speed report. A dead form produces silence you eventually notice. Marketing that stops working shows up in the numbers.
Non-compliant advertising does none of that. It loads perfectly. It often converts better than the compliant version, because the things section 133 prohibits are the things that persuade. A page with patient reviews and an outcome promise will usually outperform the page without them. The feedback you get is positive.
So the four systems a practice owner actually watches all report that the page is fine:
| What you watch | What it says about a non-compliant page |
|---|---|
| The website itself | Nothing. The page loads and looks correct. |
| Google Search Console | Nothing. AHPRA rules are not a Google ranking factor. |
| Your conversion numbers | Often better, because prohibited claims persuade. |
| Patients and staff | Nothing. Almost nobody reads a clinic page as a regulator would. |
There is exactly one system that will tell you, and it is a letter from AHPRA. By the time that arrives it is no longer a question about your website. It is a matter with your name on it.
The reason most clinics have not checked is not that checking is hard. It is that nothing has ever prompted them to. Compliance is the only part of a website with no built-in alarm.
What is AHPRA actually planning?
This is the part that has had almost no attention, and it is written down in AHPRA's own advertising compliance and enforcement strategy, in the section on declarations and audit.
The strategy says, word for word:
«This second version of the strategy includes the staged implementation of a new proactive approach to advertising compliance. We will ask registered health practitioners to declare that, if they advertise, their advertising meets the National Law's advertising requirements. We will conduct audits to check practitioner compliance with these declarations and advertising requirements. The audit sample will be sufficient to generalise the outcomes to the entire profession and will enable Ahpra to advise the National Boards of the overall advertising and non-compliance rates for their profession.»
Ahpra, Advertising compliance and enforcement strategy, section 2f.
Read the second sentence again. Practitioners will be asked to declare that their advertising complies. Read the third. AHPRA will audit against that declaration.
Then read the fourth, which is the one nobody has noticed. The sample will be big enough to generalise to the entire profession. That is not enforcement language. That is survey language. AHPRA is describing a way to measure how much of a profession is non-compliant, whether or not anyone has complained about any of it.
Two things follow. First, the trigger for being looked at stops being a complaint and starts being a sample. Nothing you do makes you less likely to be sampled. Second, AHPRA will end up holding a number for the overall non-compliance rate in each profession, which is a number that currently does not exist in public.
A note on timing, because it matters. The strategy calls this a staged implementation and does not attach a date to it. We are not telling you a declaration is arriving in your next renewal, because the document does not say that. We are telling you the direction is written down and published by the regulator.
What changes when you have to declare it?
Everything about the position you are in, and none of the rules.
Right now, "I thought our website was fine" is a reasonable answer. The advertising guidelines are guidance. If you got it wrong, you got it wrong, and the usual first step is a letter asking you to fix it within 30 days.
A declaration is a different kind of object. It is a statement you make to your regulator, on the record, about a fact you are supposed to have verified. The gap between believing your advertising complies and asserting that it does is the entire subject of this article, and a declaration is where that gap stops being private.
| Today | Under a declaration | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are doing | Holding an opinion | Making a statement to a regulator |
| What triggers a look | Someone complains | You are in the sample |
| What "I didn't know" means | An explanation | A question about the declaration |
| Who has the number | Nobody | Your National Board, per profession |
None of this is a reason to panic, and it is not a new rule. Section 133 has said the same five things for years, and we have written them out in the AHPRA advertising guidelines for 2026. It is a reason to move checking from the list of things you would get to eventually onto the list of things you have done.
Is the regulator's workload actually growing?
Yes, and the shape of the growth is the interesting part.
AHPRA's annual report for 2024/25 gives three figures for notifications, which are the formal concerns raised about practitioners. It received 13,327, which it says is 19.0% more than the year before. It closed 12,086, which it says is 8.3% more than the year before and more than in any previous year. At 30 June there were 5,627 notifications still open, which it says is 26.7% more than the year before, a rise of 1,186.
Intake grew more than twice as fast as throughput. The backlog grew faster than either. AHPRA closed more notifications than it ever has and still finished the year further behind than it started.
That is the condition under which a regulator builds a proactive, sampled audit programme instead of waiting for complaints. Chasing individual complaints does not scale. Sampling does.
Be careful with these numbers, and we are going to be careful with them too. They are all notifications, across conduct, health and performance. They are not advertising complaints, which are a much smaller and separately reported stream. We have written up the advertising-specific figures, including what happened to the practitioners AHPRA contacted, in what 775 advertising complaints actually led to. Do not read the chart above as a measure of advertising enforcement, because it is not one.
What if your agency wrote the page?
Then you are still the advertiser, and AHPRA has written that down too.
The strategy defines who it applies to, and the definition does not turn on who typed the words:
«The person or entity who controls part or all of the advertising (i.e. who authorises the content) is considered the advertiser and is responsible for compliance with the advertising requirements. Advertisers must check any content developed by others on their behalf.»
Ahpra, Advertising compliance and enforcement strategy.
That last sentence is doing a lot of work, and it is worth reading slowly. The obligation to check content someone else produced is stated as a requirement of the advertiser. Not a suggestion, and not something that transfers with the invoice.
The practical version: if you approved it, you advertised it. An agency can be excellent and you are still the one on the register. If you want the five-minute test for whether your agency understands this, we wrote one in does your marketing agency understand AHPRA.
What does "checked" actually mean?
It means something specific, and it is narrower than most people assume. A compliance check is not a review of whether your marketing is good. It is a read of every published surface against five grounds, each of which is a separate offence under section 133 of the National Law.
Here is what each ground actually looks like on a clinic website, which is the translation step that usually goes missing.
| Section 133 ground | Where it usually shows up on a clinic site |
|---|---|
| False, misleading or deceptive, or likely to be. | Titles and qualifications, "specialist" used loosely, claims about experience, out-of-date practitioner bios. |
| Offers a gift, discount or inducement without stating the terms and conditions. | Consult offers, package pricing, referral rewards, expired promotions still on the page. |
| Uses testimonials or purported testimonials about the service. | Review widgets, embedded Google star ratings, quoted patient feedback, replies that adopt a clinical review. |
| Creates an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment. | Outcome promises, recovery timelines, before-and-after imagery with no conditions stated. |
| Encourages the indiscriminate or unnecessary use of the service. | "Book a scan just in case", screening urgency, quantity discounts on clinical services. |
Two things people miss. The grounds are cumulative, so one paragraph can breach more than one. And "advertising" is broader than your website: it covers your social profiles, your ad copy, your Google Business listing and anything else that promotes the service.
How do you run the check yourself?
You can do a real first pass in an afternoon, for nothing, and you should do it before you pay anyone. Here is the order that finds the most in the least time.
- List every surface, not just the website. Homepage, every service page, every practitioner bio, the booking flow, your Instagram and Facebook profiles and pinned posts, your Google Business Profile, and any ad copy currently running.
- Search your own site for the review widgets first. Testimonials are the most common finding and the easiest to spot. Look for star ratings, embedded review feeds and quoted patient comments. Check the ones you did not add, because plugins and themes inject them.
- Read every practitioner bio against the register. Look up each named practitioner and confirm the title, registration status and any endorsement on the page match what the register says today. People leave, and pages do not notice.
- Grep your copy for outcome language. Words like guaranteed, permanent, painless, cure, and any specific recovery timeline. Then every superlative: best, leading, number one, most experienced.
- Find every price, offer and package. For each one, ask whether the terms and conditions are on the same page and currently true. Expired offers are a common and completely avoidable finding.
- Write down what you found and the date. This is the step people skip and it is the one that matters most. A dated record of a check you ran is the difference between having checked and believing you are fine.
If you want a tighter, timed version of this covering speed and Google's quality questions as well, we published one in the 30-minute healthcare website audit. If you would rather make it a habit than a one-off, the quarterly marketing review template puts the compliance sweep on a 90-day cycle.
What this article is not
Four limits, stated plainly, because a post about checking things should be checkable.
- This is general information, not legal advice. AHPRA says the same thing about its own guidelines. If a specific claim on your site worries you, get advice from a lawyer or your indemnity insurer.
- We are not telling you a declaration is imminent. The strategy describes a staged implementation and attaches no date. What is certain is that the approach is published; what is not certain is when it reaches your profession.
- The notification figures are not advertising figures. They cover all notification types. We have said this twice on purpose.
- A self-check is a first pass, not a clearance. It reliably finds the obvious things. It will not catch the judgement calls, and it is worth the afternoon anyway.
The honest summary is short. Nothing about your website will ever tell you it breaches section 133. The regulator is building the thing that will. Between now and then, the only question worth answering is whether you have actually looked.
