Almost every advertising breach I see in dental practices comes from the same place. Not from a practice trying to bend the rules, but from a practice doing something that looks completely ordinary.
A five star Google review gets shared to Instagram because it is lovely and the team is proud of it. A whitening offer goes up with a price and no terms, because the terms felt like clutter. A before and after set goes on the website because the result was genuinely good.
Each of those can be a breach of section 133 of the National Law. None of them involves anyone behaving badly.
Why this keeps happening
Part of it is that the rules are explained to practices in two unhelpful ways. Either they are summarised so tightly that they sound absolute, which leads practices to believe they cannot use any review at all, or they are explained in regulatory language that nobody has time to work through between patients.
The testimonial rule is the clearest example. Practices are often told that patient reviews cannot be used in advertising, full stop. That is not what the National Law says. A testimonial, for these purposes, is a positive statement about the clinical aspects of the service: the symptom, the diagnosis or treatment, the outcome, or the practitioner’s clinical skill. A review that only talks about how the team made someone feel, how easy booking was, or how well the appointment ran is not a testimonial and can be used. Ahpra sets this out in its own guidance on the testimonial requirements.
The practices that believe reviews are entirely off limits are giving away something they are allowed to use. The practices that share the glowing clinical ones are exposed. Both misunderstandings come from the same gap.
What we have published
We have put together a plain English reference page covering what the advertising rules permit and forbid for a dental practice. It works through the five prohibitions in section 133, then goes into the areas practices actually get caught by: testimonials and reviews, titles and qualifications, prices and offers, before and after images, and health condition claims.
It also covers the part practices tend not to think about until it matters, which is that responsibility does not transfer. If a marketing agency publishes something on your behalf that breaches the rules, the practice and the practitioner still answer for it.
There is a short checklist at the end you can run against your own website and social accounts. In my experience most practices find their issues in the first three questions.
A note on the “2026 changes”
If you have seen agency articles this year announcing major AHPRA advertising changes for 2026, treat them carefully. The current Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service took effect in December 2020 and the advertising prohibitions themselves have not moved.
What has changed is the cost of getting it wrong. Amendments to the National Law in 2022 raised the maximum penalty to $60,000 per offence for an individual and $120,000 for a body corporate, and since July 2024 those figures apply in every jurisdiction, including Western Australia. A good deal of the material circulating still quotes the older penalties, so if you have read that a breach costs $5,000, that number is out of date.
The obligation has not shifted. The exposure has.
If you want another set of eyes
Trilbii’s AHPRA Website Checker reviews a practice website page by page and flags content that may need attention against the advertising guidelines and the practice’s own guardrails, with a plain language explanation of why each item was flagged. It does not decide what you publish. That stays with the practitioner and the practice, as it should.
If you would rather work through it yourself, the reference page has everything you need to do that, including links to every Ahpra source it draws on. The starting point on Ahpra’s own site is the advertising guidelines and guidance hub.
The practices that believe reviews are entirely off limits are giving away something they are allowed to use.
Carolyn S Dean, Founder and CEO, Trilbii AI
Trilbii AI builds practical AI tools for the non clinical side of Australian dental practice life.
