A patient on your About page is settling one question: can I believe this person. We measured 20 live Australian clinic About pages on 11 September 2026 against six facts a patient can actually check. Not one printed an AHPRA registration number. Only 9 of 20 named a practitioner. No page carried more than 3 of the six, and the median page carried two. Meanwhile best appeared 17 times across 9 of the 20 pages. The About page is not short of confidence. It is short of evidence.
What is a patient actually trying to settle on an About page?
Not your story. Not your values. Not the year the fit-out was finished.
Someone lands on your About page after they have already decided they might need what you do. They are doing the last check before they call. They want to know whether 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 is a question with an answer. It is checkable. And almost nobody 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, found each one's About page from its own navigation, and fetched it. Twenty had one. One had no About page anywhere on the site. That is 19,794 words and 856 sentences of clinic copy.
Then we checked each page for six things a patient can verify without taking anyone's word for it.
Two of those bars are at zero. Not one clinic in the sample printed an AHPRA registration number, and not one mentioned a language other than English.
The distribution matters more than any single row. The best page in the sample carried 3 of the six. One page carried none. The median carried two. There is no clinic in this sample doing this well, which means there is no incumbent to beat.
Why does a registration number beat every other line on the page?
Because it is the only thing on an About page that a stranger can confirm in thirty seconds.
Section 121 of the National Law requires 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". The public register is a legal obligation, not a courtesy.
So when a page says the practitioner is registered, the patient has to take that on faith. When the page prints the number, the patient does not. They search it, they see the registration type, the profession, and any conditions on it, and the question is closed.
2 of the 20 pages mentioned AHPRA at all. Zero gave a number.
Is the About page worse than the rest of the site?
We expected yes. It is not.
The September measurement of these clinics pooled several categories of flagged term, so quoting it here would compare two different instruments. Instead we re-fetched the other page we had measured on each of these sites and ran the identical scan over both corpora 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 |
Within rounding, the two are the same. The About page is not unusually boastful. It is unusually wasted. It is the one page a patient opens specifically to check you, and it carries no more proof than a service page does.
Which words are doing the work instead?
After a human read every flagged sentence, 35 of them were clear-cut unverifiable claims about the practice, 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 prohibits advertising a regulated health service in a way that "is false, misleading or deceptive or is likely to be misleading or deceptive". An unsubstantiated best or expert sits in that. It is also the least persuasive sentence on the page, because every competitor says it.
| 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?
When you hold specialist registration in that specialty. Not otherwise.
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 maximum penalty for an individual is "$60,000 or 3 years imprisonment or both". For a body corporate it is $120,000. Specialist recognition operates in the medical profession, the dentists division of the dental profession, and any other profession the Ministerial Council approves.
So specialist is not a banned word. It is a claim with a condition attached.
5 sentences in our sample used a specialty title in exactly this way. We did not count any of them as a breach, because we cannot tell whether the registration is held.
And neither can the patient. That is the whole argument of this piece in one line. The page makes a claim whose legality turns on a registration, and then does not print the registration. The number that would evidence the title is the same number that answers the patient's question. One line solves both.
What did the scanner get wrong?
Enough to matter. Our keyword scan flagged 54 sentences. A human read cut it 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 | An unverifiable superlative about the clinic or its people. This is the number we report. |
| An ordinary idiom | 6 | Works best for you. Perform at your best. Leading him to. The word is not making a claim. |
| A specialty title | 5 | Lawful under s115 if the registration is held, an offence if it is not. The page does not say. |
| Navigation or a title tag | 5 | A dropdown list, a menu, a heading. Two were the page title, which does still make 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 superlative about referring surgeons, not about this practice. |
This is the part worth keeping if you remember nothing else. A tool that scans your website for banned words will hand you a list that is roughly a third wrong, in both directions. It cannot see that premier was the name of a rugby grade, and it cannot see that a testimonial is a worse problem than the superlative inside it. Someone has to read the output.
What should a clinic About page say instead?
Swap the claim for the thing 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. | Two checkable facts instead of two claims. Nothing to substantiate. |
| 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) prohibits testimonials about a regulated health service. |
| We specialise in complex cases. | Either state the specialist registration and its number, or write what you treat most often and how often. | Section 115 makes the title conditional on registration. Volume is a fact, not a title. |
| Our friendly team is here to help. | Languages spoken in the clinic. Parking. Whether there are steps. Who you will see first. | Answers a real question. Zero of the 20 pages we measured mentioned a second language. |
None of this is a compliance tax. Every row makes the page more convincing. That is the argument this site keeps making, and this is the cleanest version of it we have run. On an About page the compliant sentence is also the persuasive one. The thing a regulator wants you to be able to prove is the same thing a patient wants to check. The rules on testimonials are set out in full in what you can actually publish, and the advertising rules behind all of it 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?
Quite a lot, and it is worth being blunt about it.
- Twenty pages is a sample, not a census. Four professions, five cities. It shows a pattern. It does not measure Australian healthcare.
- One page per clinic. A practitioner biography sitting on its own sub-page is unseen, and several of these sites have them. A clinic we scored at one fact out of six may carry more a click away. That said, a patient on the About page is also a click away from leaving.
- Text only. Keyword matching cannot read an image, a video, or a review widget loaded by JavaScript 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 evidences, not about whether any clinic is doing anything wrong.
- The comparison page was not chosen to be a fair opposite. It is whatever page each site's own search snippet led to on 9 September, and two of the 21 happen to be about-style pages themselves. That makes the two corpora less distinct, which would tend to hide a gap rather than invent one. We are reporting no gap.
The scripts, the manifest, the classification of all 54 flagged sentences with a reason for each, and the raw counts are in the repository that builds this site. Every number above is re-derived from them by a gate script before the page is allowed to publish.
Sources. Health Practitioner Regulation National Law, as in force, read from legislation.qld.gov.au: s115 specialist titles, s121 registers open to public inspection, s133 advertising. The AHPRA term register is imported from the compliance tooling that backs our GhostRank audit, not retyped. 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?
The things a patient can check. A named practitioner, their AHPRA registration number, the qualification and the university that awarded it, how long they have practised, what a first appointment 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 six, and the median page carried two.
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 requires the registers to be kept open for inspection by the public, free of charge, on the Agency's website. So the number turns a claim into something a patient can confirm in about thirty seconds. Not one 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 a problem. Section 133 of the National Law prohibits advertising a regulated health service in a way that is false, misleading or deceptive, or likely to be misleading or deceptive. A superlative you cannot substantiate sits squarely in that. On our sample, best appeared 17 times across 9 of 20 About pages, and it was the single most common flagged word.
Is it against the rules to say specialist?
It depends entirely on 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 maximum penalty for an individual is $60,000 or 3 years imprisonment or both. Specialist recognition operates in medicine, the dentists division of dentistry, and any other profession approved by the Ministerial Council. If the registration is held, the title is correct. If it is not, it is an offence, and the page usually gives the reader no way to tell which.
Are patient reviews allowed on a clinic About page?
Not if they describe clinical care. Section 133 prohibits advertising a regulated health service in a way that uses testimonials or purported testimonials about the service or business. That applies to a quote you place on your own About page. Two of the sentences our scan flagged were patient quotes praising clinical care, which is a separate problem from puffery 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 instrument. The About page ran at 6.3% of sentences carrying a flagged superlative against 6.0% elsewhere. The About page is not unusually boastful. It is unusually wasted, because it is the page where evidence would do the most work and it carries the least.
Can a keyword scanner check a clinic website for compliance?
It can find candidates. It cannot return a verdict. Our scanner flagged 54 sentences across the 20 About pages. A human read cut that to 35. The other 19 were a protected specialty title, a navigation menu, an ordinary idiom like works best for you, a superlative about a referring surgeon, or a patient quote that is a different breach. That is 35% of the flags wrong about what they found. A GhostRank audit is AUD $1,500, covers up to 20 pages, and quotes every flagged line with the rule it engages and a suggested rewrite.
