Reviews are one of the strongest influences on whether a patient chooses your clinic, and one of the easiest ways for a registered practitioner to end up in an advertising complaint. The rules are narrower than most clinic owners assume and broader than most marketing agencies realise. This guide sets out what an Australian audiology clinic can do with reviews, what it cannot, and how to build a request process that is safe to run at scale.
The rule in one paragraph
Section 133 of the National Law prohibits using testimonials in advertising a regulated health service. A testimonial, in this context, is a statement about the clinical aspects of the service — the treatment, the outcome, the practitioner's clinical skill. Advertising includes your website, your ads, your social posts and your printed material. It does not include reviews that patients leave, unprompted as to content, on a third-party platform such as Google. That single distinction explains almost every practical rule that follows.
What you can do
- Invite patients to leave a Google review. Asking for feedback is not prohibited. What matters is that you are not directing the content toward clinical outcomes.
- Build a systematic request process. A consistent message sent after the appointment, at a sensible interval, to every patient rather than a hand-picked few.
- Respond to reviews. Publicly, briefly, and without discussing anyone's clinical details.
- Reference non-clinical feedback. Comments about parking, wait times, front-desk service or the ease of booking are not testimonials about clinical care, though the safest position remains keeping patient statements off advertising material entirely.
- Report review counts and ratings factually where they are accurate and verifiable, without dressing them up as claims of superiority.
What you cannot do
- Reproduce clinical testimonials on your website or in ads. Copying a five-star Google review that says a patient's hearing improved onto your homepage converts it into advertising, and it is then a prohibited testimonial.
- Solicit reviews about clinical outcomes. A request that asks patients to describe how much better they hear is steering the content into prohibited territory.
- Offer any incentive. Discounts, entries into draws or gifts in exchange for reviews create both an advertising problem and a platform policy breach.
- Filter or gate. Screening patients to send only the happy ones to Google is deceptive conduct and is treated as such.
- Confirm clinical details in a public reply. Even acknowledging that a reviewer was your patient can be a privacy breach.
- Use review content to imply guaranteed results or comparative superiority over other clinics.
Compliant request wording
The safe request is short, neutral about clinical matters, and identical for every patient. Something along these lines works:
"Thanks for visiting [clinic name]. If you have a moment, we'd appreciate your feedback on your experience with our clinic — booking, our team and the service you received. You can leave a review here: [link]."
Note what it does not do: it does not mention hearing improvement, it does not mention devices, it does not ask for five stars, and it offers nothing in exchange. Send it by SMS or email a day or two after the appointment, at a point where the experience is fresh, and send it to everyone rather than to a curated list.
If you want to check your own wording, our free AHPRA advertising compliance checker screens copy against the same rules and flags the phrases that most often cause trouble.
Responding without confirming clinical details
Public replies are visible to everyone, including the reviewer's family and any future patient reading the profile. Two rules keep replies safe: never confirm that a specific person attended the clinic, and never discuss the care provided. That applies to positive reviews as well as negative ones — thanking someone for trusting you with their hearing assessment confirms an appointment took place.
For a positive review, a short generic thank you is enough. For a critical review, acknowledge the feedback in general terms, state that the clinic takes concerns seriously, and invite the person to contact the practice directly so it can be looked into. Resist the urge to correct the factual record publicly, however wrong the review is; the audience reading it will judge the tone of the response far more than the details of the dispute.
Where clinics get caught out
Three patterns account for most problems. The first is a website "testimonials" page built years ago from patient quotes about hearing improvement, which nobody has revisited since. The second is a review widget that automatically pulls Google reviews onto the website, which republishes clinical testimonials as advertising without anyone consciously deciding to. The third is a well-meaning staff member replying warmly to reviews with clinical specifics.
All three are fixable in an afternoon, and all three are the sort of thing that is only discovered during a complaint if nobody audits the site.
Building review volume the slow, safe way
Volume and recency both matter for local visibility, and neither requires anything risky. Ask consistently, ask every patient, make the link one tap, and respond to everything. Clinics that do this quietly out-accumulate clinics that run occasional campaigns, and they do it without a compliance exposure sitting on the website.
Reviews are one input into local visibility rather than the whole picture — the rest of the map pack work is set out in our Google Business Profile checklist for audiologists, and where reviews sit against the other acquisition channels is covered in how to get more hearing assessment bookings.
None of this is legal advice, and the guidelines are updated periodically — check the current AHPRA advertising guidance and your professional indemnity insurer's position before rolling out any new process. If you want the review system built alongside the rest of the programme, it forms part of our audiology marketing and medical SEO work.
Practical process for a busy clinic
The clinics that build review volume without creating risk treat it as an operational routine rather than a campaign. Decide who sends the request, when it goes out, and exactly what it says, then write that down so it does not drift when a new staff member takes it on. A fixed interval after the appointment — commonly a day or two — works better than leaving it to whoever remembers.
Use one link, shortened, going directly to the review form rather than to the profile. Every additional tap loses people, particularly in a patient cohort that may be less comfortable navigating unfamiliar screens. Offer a paper card with a QR code at reception for patients who would rather not receive a message.
Assign one person to monitor and reply, and give them the two rules — no confirmation that anyone attended, no clinical detail — in writing. Review the website quarterly for testimonial content that has crept back in, particularly after any redesign, since new pages built from old copy are a common way a compliant site becomes non-compliant again.
