A patient on your About page is settling one question: can I believe this person. On 11 September 2026 we checked 20 live Australian clinic About pages for 6 facts a patient can check for themselves. None printed an AHPRA registration number. Only 9 of 20 named a practitioner. No page carried more than 3 of the 6, and the median page carried 2. Meanwhile best appeared 17 times across 9 of the 20 pages. Your About page probably has plenty of confidence. What it lacks is proof.
What is a patient actually trying to settle on an About page?
Your patient is not there for your story, your values or the year you finished the fit-out.
People land on your About page once they have already decided they might need you. They are doing a last check before they call. They want to know if the person who will treat them is real, qualified and still registered. It is the end of the journey that starts with what patients google before they book.
That question has an answer, and the patient can check it. Yet almost no clinic answers it.
What did we find on 20 live clinic About pages?
We took the same 21 Australian clinic websites we measured for what a compliant rewrite actually changes. We found each one's About page from its own menu and saved it. Twenty had one. One had no About page anywhere on the site. That gave us 19,794 words and 856 sentences of clinic copy.
Then we checked each page for 6 things a patient can confirm without taking anyone's word for it.
Two of those bars are at zero. No clinic in the sample printed an AHPRA registration number. None mentioned a language other than English.
The spread matters more than any single row. The strongest page in the sample carried 3 of the 6. One page carried none. The median carried 2. No clinic in this sample is doing this well. That means there is nobody ahead of you to beat.
Why does a registration number beat every other line on the page?
It is the only thing on your About page that a stranger can confirm in 30 seconds.
Section 121 of the National Law asks the National Agency to keep each register "open for inspection, free of charge, by members of the public", both at its offices and "on the Agency's website". In plain words, anyone can look you up for free. The public register is a legal duty.
So if your page says you are registered, your patient has to take your word for it. If your page prints the number, they do not. They search it. They see your registration type, your profession and any conditions on it. Their question is answered.
Only 2 of the 20 pages mentioned AHPRA at all. None gave a number.
Is the About page worse than the rest of the site?
We expected it to be worse. It turned out about the same.
Our September measurement of these clinics lumped several kinds of flagged word together. So comparing it here would mix two different tests. Instead we fetched the other page we had measured on each site again. Then we ran the same scan over both sets on the same day.
| Measured 11 September 2026 | The About page | The other page on the same site |
|---|---|---|
| Pages | 20 | 21 |
| Sentences | 856 | 1,422 |
| Sentences carrying a superlative | 6.3% | 6.0% |
| Pages naming a practitioner | 9 of 20 | 10 of 21 |
| Pages printing a registration number | 0 of 20 | 1 of 21 |
Allowing for rounding, the two are the same. So the About page does not boast more than other pages. The problem is that it wastes its chance. A patient opens it for one reason, to check you. Yet it carries no more proof than a service page does.
Which words are doing the work instead?
A person read every flagged sentence. Of those, 35 were clear-cut claims about the practice that nobody could check. They sat across 12 of the 20 pages. That is 4.1% of all sentences.
| Word | Uses in clear-cut claims | Pages |
|---|---|---|
| best | 17 | 9 of 20 |
| expert | 7 | 6 of 20 |
| specialist | 2 | 1 of 20 |
| specialised | 2 | 2 of 20 |
| specialises in | 2 | 2 of 20 |
| specialising | 1 | 1 of 20 |
Section 133 of the National Law bans health ads that are written in a way that "is false, misleading or deceptive or is likely to be misleading or deceptive". In plain words, your ads must not mislead. If you write best or expert and cannot prove it, you fall inside that rule. It is also the weakest sentence on your page, because every competitor says it too.
| Profession | Pages | Sentences | Clear-cut claims | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physio | 6 | 149 | 11 | 7.4% |
| Dental | 5 | 279 | 15 | 5.4% |
| Psychology | 4 | 152 | 5 | 3.3% |
| Chiro and podiatry | 5 | 276 | 4 | 1.4% |
When is calling yourself a specialist allowed?
You can use it only when you hold specialist registration in that specialty.
Section 115 of the National Law says a person must not knowingly or recklessly use "a specialist title for a recognised specialty unless the person is registered under this Law in the specialty". The top penalty for a person is "$60,000 or 3 years imprisonment or both". For a company it is $120,000. Specialist titles exist in medicine, for dentists within dentistry, and in any other profession the Ministerial Council approves.
So specialist is allowed in some cases. It is a claim with a condition attached.
In our sample, 5 sentences used a specialty title in this way. We did not count any of them as a breach, because we cannot tell if the registration is held.
Your patient cannot tell either. That is the whole argument of this piece in one line. The page makes a claim that is only legal if a registration exists. Then it does not print the registration. The number that proves the title is the same number that answers your patient's question. One line fixes both problems.
What did the scanner get wrong?
It got enough wrong to matter. Our keyword scan flagged 54 sentences. A person read them and cut that to 35. The other 19, which is 35% of the flags, were not claims about the practice at all.
| What the flag actually was | Count | Why it is not a breach |
|---|---|---|
| A claim about this practice | 35 | A boast about the clinic or its people that nobody can check. This is the number we report. |
| An ordinary idiom | 6 | Works best for you. Perform at your best. Leading him to. Here the word makes no claim. |
| A specialty title | 5 | Legal under s115 if the registration is held, an offence if it is not. The page does not say which. |
| Navigation or a title tag | 5 | A dropdown list, a menu or a heading. Two were the page title, which still makes the claim in search. |
| A patient's own words | 2 | A different breach. Section 133(1)(c) covers testimonials about the service. |
| A claim about somebody else | 1 | A boast about referring surgeons, rather than this practice. |
If you remember one thing from this post, make it this. A tool that scans your website for banned words will give you a list that is roughly a third wrong, in both directions. It cannot see that premier was the name of a rugby grade. It cannot see that a testimonial is a worse problem than the boast inside it. Someone has to read what it finds.
What should a clinic About page say instead?
Swap each claim for the fact that makes the claim unnecessary.
| The line we kept finding | What to write instead | Why it is stronger |
|---|---|---|
| Our expert team provides the best care in the area. | Four physiotherapists. Registration numbers below. The practice has run from this address since 2011. | You give 2 facts people can check, in place of 2 claims. You have nothing to prove. |
| Dr [Name] is a leading practitioner with years of experience. | Dr [Name] qualified at [University] in 2009 and has practised in [suburb] for eleven years. AHPRA registration [number]. | A patient can confirm every part of it. So can a regulator. |
| Quite literally the best dentist I have been to. | Remove it. Replace with what the first appointment involves and what it costs. | Section 133(1)(c) bans testimonials in health ads. |
| We specialise in complex cases. | Either state the specialist registration and its number, or write what you treat most often and how often. | Under section 115, you can only use the title if you hold the registration. How often you treat something is a fact anyone can state. |
| Our friendly team is here to help. | Languages spoken in the clinic. Parking. Whether there are steps. Who you will see first. | It answers a real question. None of the 20 pages we measured mentioned a second language. |
None of this is a compliance tax. Every row makes your page more convincing. This site keeps making that point, and this is the clearest test of it we have run. On an About page, the safe sentence is also the one that persuades. What a regulator wants you to prove is the same thing your patient wants to check. You can read the testimonial rules in full in what you can actually publish. The ad rules behind all of it are in the AHPRA advertising guidelines. If you would rather hand the whole page to someone, that is website copy.
What can this measurement not tell you?
It cannot tell you quite a lot, and we want to be honest about that.
- Twenty pages is a sample. It is far from a full count. We covered 4 professions in 5 cities. It shows a pattern. It does not measure all of Australian healthcare.
- We read one page per clinic. We did not see practitioner bios on their own sub-pages, and several of these sites have them. A clinic we scored at 1 fact out of 6 may have more a click away. Even so, a patient on your About page is also a click away from leaving.
- We read text only. Keyword matching cannot read an image, a video, or a review box that loads after the page arrives. Claims live in all three.
- We did not check whether anything is true. We did not look up a single practitioner on the register. The finding is about what the page proves. It says nothing about whether any clinic is doing anything wrong.
- The comparison page was not picked as a fair opposite. It is whatever page each site's own search result led to on 9 September. Two of the 21 happen to be About-style pages themselves. That makes the two sets more alike, which would tend to hide a gap rather than create one. We found no gap.
The scripts, the site list, the sorting of all 54 flagged sentences with a reason for each, and the raw counts sit in the code folder that builds this site. A check script works out every number above again from them before the page can go live.
Sources. The National Law for health practitioners, as in force, read from legislation.qld.gov.au: s115 specialist titles, s121 registers open to public inspection, s133 advertising. We import the AHPRA term register from the compliance tools behind our All Clear Audit, and we do not retype it. Our own measurement of 20 clinic About pages and 21 comparison pages, 11 September 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a clinic put on its About page?
Put the things your patient can check. Name the practitioner and give their AHPRA registration number. List the qualification and the university that gave it, how long they have practised, what a first visit costs, and any language other than English spoken in the clinic. Across the 20 Australian clinic About pages we measured on 11 September 2026, no page carried more than 3 of those 6. The median page carried 2.
Should a clinic publish its AHPRA registration number?
There is a strong case for it, and no rule against it. Section 121 of the National Law says the registers must be open to the public, free of charge, on the Agency's website. So the number turns your claim into something a patient can confirm in about 30 seconds. None of the 20 About pages we measured printed one. Only 2 of 20 mentioned AHPRA at all.
Can a clinic call itself the best in its area?
It is the claim most likely to cause you a problem. Section 133 of the National Law bans health ads that are false, misleading or deceptive, or likely to mislead. A boast you cannot prove falls right inside that. In our sample, best appeared 17 times across 9 of 20 About pages. It was the most common flagged word.
Is it against the rules to say specialist?
It depends on your registration. Section 115 of the National Law says a person must not knowingly or recklessly use a specialist title for a recognised specialty unless registered in that specialty. The top penalty for a person is $60,000 or 3 years imprisonment or both. Specialist titles exist in medicine, for dentists within dentistry, and in any other profession the Ministerial Council approves. If you hold the registration, the title is correct. If you do not, it is an offence. Most pages give the reader no way to tell which.
Are patient reviews allowed on a clinic About page?
Not if they describe clinical care. Section 133 bans health ads that use testimonials about the service or business. That covers a quote you put on your own About page. Two of the sentences our scan flagged were patient quotes praising clinical care. That is a separate problem from a boast, and a clearer one.
Does the About page break more rules than the rest of a clinic website?
No, and that surprised us. We measured the About page and one other page on the same 21 sites, on the same day, with the same test. On the About page, 6.3% of sentences carried a flagged boast, against 6.0% elsewhere. So the About page does not boast more. It wastes its chance, because it is where proof would help you most and it carries the least.
Can a keyword scanner check a clinic website for compliance?
It can find lines to check. It cannot make the call. Our scanner flagged 54 sentences across the 20 About pages. A person read them and cut that to 35. The other 19 were a protected specialty title, a menu, an everyday phrase like works best for you, a boast about a referring surgeon, or a patient quote that breaks a different rule. So 35% of the flags were wrong about what they found. An All Clear Audit is AUD $1,500 for the first ten clinics (then $2,500), covers every page of the site, and quotes every flagged line with the rule it engages and a suggested rewrite.
