Vikas Thakur / / 13 min readA five-star review that only praises your team is compliant on its own. AHPRA's cosmetic procedure advertising guidelines treat a reply that repeats the outcome back to the reviewer as using that review as a testimonial, even when the original review broke no rules at all.
Vikas Thakur / / 13 min readWhen the nurse injector or associate dentist who has been the public face of your marketing gives notice, at least six digital assets are at risk if nobody checks them first. Domain contact details, Google Business Profile admin, social accounts, testimonial content and booking profiles do not automatically follow the practice. Here is the checklist to run before, not after, the exit interview.
Vikas Thakur / / 11 min readYou can display an aggregate Google star rating on a clinic website without breaching the testimonial rule in section 133 of the National Law, provided the number stands alone. The risk most sites miss is not the visible badge, it is review text still sitting in hidden schema markup or CSS-hidden widget code that a scraper or a regulator can still read.
Vikas Thakur / / 12 min readMost WordPress themes, page builders and review plugins write Review or AggregateRating schema into a clinic page's JSON-LD automatically, often without the site owner knowing it exists. Section 133 of the National Law bans testimonials about a clinical aspect of a regulated health service, and hidden structured data carrying a patient's outcome statement is still a publication. As at 14 September 2026, Google's own guidelines also will not show a rich result for a business's markup about its own reviews, so the schema creates compliance exposure with no ranking benefit to offset it.
Vikas Thakur / / 8 min readA five-star Google review is not an AHPRA problem on its own. Liking, sharing, or replying to one with outcome language can turn it into a breach worth up to $120,000 for a clinic, under AHPRA's own testimonial guidance.
Vikas Thakur / / 10 min readA 2022 amendment to the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law lifted the maximum testimonial-breach penalty twelvefold, to $60,000 for an individual and $120,000 for a body corporate. AHPRA's cosmetic procedure guidelines, effective 2 September 2025, then tightened the rule further for social media influencers.
