Google Reviews and AHPRA: What an Australian Dental Practice Can and Cannot Do
You may ask patients for Google reviews. AHPRA never said otherwise. What you may not do is republish clinical ones, filter them, or route unhappy patients away.
Asking patients for Google reviews within AHPRA's rules
Table of Contents11 sections
A patient leaves happy, and you'd like to ask for a Google review. Then someone tells you AHPRA doesn't allow it.
The short version: you can ask, because nothing in AHPRA's advertising guidelines, testimonial tool or FAQ bans it, and the word "solicit" isn't in any of them. What the National Law bans is using a testimonial in advertising you control, so the risk sits in what you do with a review after it arrives.
Key Takeaways
- You're allowed to ask. The National Law bans using testimonials in advertising, and the word "solicit" isn't in any of AHPRA's three documents on advertising, testimonials or the FAQ.
- A testimonial is about clinical care. Comments on service, reception or how you explained things aren't testimonials, and you can republish them.
- Review gating fails twice. Sending unhappy patients to a private form breaks Google's fake engagement policy and leaves a misleading public record.
- Three of Whitespark's top twelve local ranking factors are reviews (ratings 6th, quantity with text 9th, recency 11th, out of 187 scored by 47 practitioners in 2026).
- You can't get star snippets from reviews of yourself, embedded widget included. Google says so in writing.
Two things about Google reviews are true at the same time, and they pull against each other.
Google says it plainly on its own local ranking page: "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking". And when Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors asked 47 local search practitioners to score 187 factors, three of the top twelve were about reviews:
| Review factor | Rank out of 187 |
|---|---|
| High numerical Google ratings | 6th |
| Quantity of native Google reviews with text | 9th |
| Recency of reviews | 11th |
But you're also a registered health practitioner, and the National Law bans using testimonials to advertise a regulated health service, which is the part every review tactic borrowed from a plumber or a café never accounts for.
So most dental practices end up in one of two bad places. Some ignore reviews completely because somebody once told them AHPRA doesn't allow them, while others copy the review tactics a plumber would use and let the risk build up for years without anyone noticing. You don't have to be in either.
The Claim Everyone Repeats That Isn't in the Guidance
Search "can dentists ask for Google reviews" and you'll find Australian marketing sites saying AHPRA tells you not to encourage patients to leave reviews, usually in a paragraph that links to nothing AHPRA actually published.
I went looking for that sentence. It isn't in the advertising guidelines, the testimonial tool or the advertising FAQ. The word "solicit" doesn't appear once across all three:
| AHPRA document | Bans asking for reviews? | The word "solicit" |
|---|---|---|
| Advertising guidelines | No | Not there |
| Testimonial tool | No | Not there |
| Advertising FAQ | No | Not there |
And every "encourage" in them belongs to a different part of section 133: the one about encouraging people to use health services they don't need. The National Law bans using a testimonial in advertising. It says nothing about asking for one.
That gap changes what you'd actually do. Believe the myth and you do nothing at all for years, so your profile stays thin while the practice down the road keeps asking every patient on the way out. Follow the real rule and you can build reviews like any other business, then put the care into what happens after one arrives.
One caution before you run with this: AHPRA hasn't said asking is fine either, because it has said nothing at all about the act of asking, in any of the three documents.
So read the silence as silence. If your request nudges patients to praise the treatment itself, you're collecting testimonials on purpose. Ask about the visit, and leave the dentistry out of it.
Which Google Reviews Count as a Testimonial
I go deeper on this in what the AHPRA advertising rules actually ban, but the definition is short enough to repeat here.
AHPRA says testimonials are "recommendations or positive statements about the clinical aspects of a regulated health service". Clinical aspects means "statements about symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, outcome". Then comes the sentence that does most of the work:
Not all reviews or positive comments made about a regulated health service are considered testimonials. For example, comments about customer service or communication style that do not include a reference to clinical aspects are not considered testimonials for the purposes of the National Law.
The testimonial tool is even plainer: "Reviews (i.e. feedback about healthcare experiences that does not refer to clinical aspects of a regulated health service) are allowed in advertising."
So a review that says you ran on time, that reception was patient with a nervous child and that parking was easy? You can publish it. Here are a few more, sorted the same way:
| What the review says | Testimonial? | On your own site |
|---|---|---|
| "They called me back within the hour" | No, it's service | Allowed, complete and unedited |
| "Parking was easy and they ran on time" | No, it's service | Allowed |
| "Reception was so patient with my nervous six-year-old" | No, it's communication | Allowed |
| "The root canal was painless and the crown matches perfectly" | Yes: treatment and outcome | Keep it out |
| A glowing patient-style quote the practice wrote itself | Yes: a "purported testimonial" | Never |
That last row needs a word. The guidelines define a "purported testimonial" as "a statement or representation that appears to be a testimonial, whether provided in the first or third person", which catches a practice writing patient-style quotes itself. It happens on dental websites more often than it should.
Where Google Sits, and Why I Flag This as Inference
This one surprised me: AHPRA never mentions Google. No Google reviews, no Google Business Profile, no Google Maps. The only platform named anywhere in the three documents is Facebook, once. Everything else is "a search engine or a review platform".
So anyone telling you "AHPRA says Google reviews are fine" is applying a general test, and nobody is quoting an example (that includes me). Here is the test, word for word from section 3.2 of the guidelines: an advertiser controls advertising where
they publish or authorise content or direct someone to publish or draft content (including a third party, staff member or marketing agency) or there is a mechanism for the advertiser to modify or remove content published by an unrelated publisher.
So who carries a review on Google? Hold a Google Business Profile up against the test. You didn't publish or authorise the patient's review, you can't edit or delete it, and unlike Facebook, Google gives you no switch to turn reviews off.
Run the same two limbs across every place a review can end up:
| Where the review appears | You published or authorised it? | You can modify or remove it? | Your responsibility? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your website | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| A reviews widget embedded on your site | Yes, the moment it displays | Yes | Yes |
| Your Instagram, ads, brochures | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Your clinic Facebook page | No | Yes, you can remove or switch off reviews | Yes |
| Your Google Business Profile | No | No | No |
The guidelines then say it directly: "Advertisers are not responsible for removing (or trying to have removed) testimonials published on platforms they do not control." The FAQ adds that boards "do not expect you to monitor the internet or social media for things that may be written about you in forums you do not control".
The conclusion follows cleanly, but it's a conclusion drawn from a test, and nobody wrote it as a rule about Google. If your risk tolerance is low, that's a question for your indemnity insurer. A marketing agency (us included) is the wrong place to settle it.
Facebook is different, and AHPRA does cover it: a clinic Facebook page that promotes the practice is advertising, and the testimonials patients post there are your responsibility. The guidelines note that "not all social media sites allow for editing or removal of testimonials" and that compliance "may be achieved by disabling the reviews/testimonials functions".
My advice for most dental practices: turn Facebook recommendations off. You gain very little from them, and they carry a duty you can't meet any other way.
The Google Reviews Widget Problem
Is there a Google reviews widget on your homepage? This is where practices get into trouble, and the widget is almost always put there by a web developer with good intentions.
A Google reviews widget on your homepage takes patient text from a platform you don't control and republishes it on one you do. The moment it shows on your site, you've published it. That's limb one of the control test, exactly, and it's the clearest case of what you do with a review after it arrives going wrong.
If any of those reviews mention treatment, symptoms or outcomes (and on a dental profile, plenty will), you now have testimonials in your own advertising. Open your homepage and check.
The same logic catches every other copy you make of a review:
- a screenshot of a five-star review on Instagram
- a quote from one in a Google Ads sitelink
- one printed in a waiting room brochure
AHPRA's FAQ is explicit about the social case: it means "not sharing or re-tweeting any comments made by a person about a clinical aspect of a regulated health service you provide on a third-party website".
There's a second reason to be wary of review widgets, and it has nothing to do with AHPRA. Google's review snippet documentation, updated 24 July 2026, rules out the star feature when a business controls the reviews about itself. That holds "including through an embedded third-party widget (for example, Google Business reviews or Facebook reviews widget)".
So the widget won't put stars in your search results, no matter how it's set up or who installed it or what they promised you when they did. It never was going to. If that was the pitch, the pitch was wrong.
Showing Only the Good Ones Is the Sharpest Trap
Most review widgets have a setting called something like "minimum rating to display", and practices set it to four or five stars without a second thought about what that does to the public record.
AHPRA put out a media release about exactly this on 13 June 2018, titled Selectively editing reviews or testimonials may break the law. It gives three examples of what's misleading by its nature:
edit a review that is negative to make it positive, as this falsely presents the feedback edit a review that has a mix of negative and positive comments so that the published review only has positive comments, as this falsely implies that the reviewer only had positive feedback, or edit a review so that it no longer accurately reflects all the reviewer's feedback and presents an inaccurate or false impression of the reviewer's views.
Then AHPRA's CEO at the time, Martin Fletcher:
If advertisers edit reviews or testimonials there is a high risk that the edited reviews will become misleading or deceptive. Only publishing complete and unedited reviews that are not testimonials will help advertisers to avoid breaching the National Law.
The testimonial tool takes it past editing, to choosing. Publishing reviews can mislead "if reviews are edited, either by removing part of the review or by selectively including/excluding whole reviews".
A four-star-minimum filter selects whole reviews. That's the exact thing the tool names.
Fletcher also pointed to the second regulator in the room: moderation practices "must comply with the National Law and the Australian Consumer Law". Misleading conduct is the ACCC's ground, whatever a board thinks, and the ACCC has been active on fake and filtered reviews.
Google Bans the Same Thing, for Its Own Reasons
Google agrees with AHPRA here. It just gets there from a different direction, because its worry is fake engagement on its own platform rather than misleading health advertising.
Its prohibited and restricted content policy covers what it calls fake engagement. Four things are out:
- Discouraging or prohibiting negative reviews.
- Asking only your happy customers for reviews.
- Offering payment, discounts, or free goods and services for a review.
- Telling staff to collect a set number of reviews, or reviews that say particular things.
And Google does more than delete reviews: it says it may block a profile from getting new reviews for a while, unpublish existing ones, or show a public warning that fake reviews were removed.
Picture a patient reading that warning on your profile the night before they book. Would they still come in?
So "send the happy patients to Google and the unhappy ones to a private feedback form" fails twice. It's selective solicitation under Google's policy. And it builds a misleading public record under the National Law and the ACL.
Replying to Google Reviews: The Part Nobody Can Answer Cleanly
What Patients Expect From a Reply
People expect you to reply. In BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, the numbers came out high:
| Survey finding | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Expect business owners to respond to reviews | 89% |
| More likely to use a business that responds to all of them | 80% |
| Put off by generic or templated replies | 50% |
| Unlikely to use a business that never replies | 42% |
Read the method before you act on those numbers, because it matters more than the numbers do: 1,002 US adults, surveyed through SurveyMonkey, with no Australian sample and no dental or healthcare breakdown of any kind. I haven't found an Australian equivalent, so any "percentage of Australian dental patients" quoted from this survey isn't in there.
What AHPRA Says About Engaging With Reviews
Now the awkward part, straight from AHPRA's guidance:
Advertisers should take care if they choose to engage with reviews on third-party websites as this may be considered using a testimonial to advertise a regulated health service.
"Engage with" isn't defined, though the FAQ makes clear it covers sharing and re-tweeting. Does a short thank-you under a Google review count? Nothing AHPRA has published answers that, and I won't pretend it does.
What I'd do (my judgement, and only that) is reply in a way that adds nothing about clinical care and quotes nothing back.
"Thanks for taking the time to write this, we're glad the visit went smoothly. See you at the next check-up." You've thanked a person without repeating any claim about treatment.
Replying to a Negative Review
Negative reviews come with a separate and much older duty: patient confidentiality. Don't confirm the person was a patient, don't correct their account of the treatment, and don't explain what happened clinically.
Each of those is a privacy problem long before it's an advertising one, so the reply that protects you is the boring one: say you're sorry to hear it, offer to take it offline, and give them a name and a number to contact.
A Google Reviews Routine That Survives Both Rulebooks
If you'd rather hand this part over, our review replies and templates, written inside the health advertising rules, cover the drafting. Either way, the routine is short.
Ask Everyone, and Ask About the Visit
- Ask every patient. On the way out or by message afterwards, in a way that reaches everyone, however the appointment went.
- Ask about the visit and leave the treatment out. "How did we do today?" gets you service comments. "How happy are you with your new veneers?" gets you testimonials you asked for.
- Offer nothing in return. Google bans it, and under section 133 an inducement without stated conditions is its own offence.
Keep Your Own Pages Free of Clinical Review Content
If you want reviews on your site, use only comments about service, published complete, unedited and unfiltered by star rating. The safest version is a link to your Google profile and no widget at all. And turn off Facebook recommendations while you're at it.
Reply, and Then Leave Google Alone
Reply to everything. Keep it brief, with no clinical detail, no treatment named and nothing quoted back from the review itself.
Otherwise, leave Google alone. You don't have to monitor it or remove testimonials from it, and trying to curate it is where the risk starts. On Google, what you do with a review after it arrives should be almost nothing.
The rest is volume and recency, a systems problem rather than a legal one. In the same survey, 47% wouldn't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews. And 74% look for reviews from the last three months. A practice with 200 reviews and none since March looks worse than one with 60 recent ones.
How reviews fit with the hours, categories and photos on your listing is its own topic. I cover it in the Google Business Profile guide for dental practices.
Common Questions
Are we allowed to ask patients for Google reviews?
Nothing stops you: AHPRA's advertising guidelines, testimonial tool and advertising FAQ don't ban asking, and the ban is on using testimonials in advertising you control. Ask everyone, ask about the visit and leave the treatment out, and offer nothing in return.
Do we have to get clinical reviews removed from Google?
No. AHPRA says advertisers aren't responsible for removing testimonials on platforms they don't control, and boards don't expect you to monitor forums outside your control.
Can we put our Google reviews on our website?
Only the ones with no reference to symptoms, diagnosis, treatment or outcome, published complete and unedited, with no filtering by rating. A standard reviews widget fails all three by default.
Is a four-star minimum filter on our widget a problem?
Yes. AHPRA's testimonial tool names "selectively including/excluding whole reviews" as potentially misleading, and Google's own policy separately bans asking only for positive reviews.
Can we send unhappy patients to a private form instead?
That's review gating: it breaks Google's fake engagement policy, and it creates a misleading public record that the National Law and the Australian Consumer Law both care about. Use a feedback form for everyone or for no one.
Should we reply to reviews?
Patients expect it, though that data is US only, and AHPRA warns advertisers to "take care" when engaging with reviews on third-party sites without ever defining the term. Keep replies short, leave out clinical detail, quote nothing back, and never confirm someone was a patient.
Will review schema get us stars in Google?
For reviews of yourself, no. Google's documentation rules out self-serving reviews for the star feature, embedded widgets included.
Do reviews affect rankings?
Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking. Whitespark's 2026 panel puts ratings, review quantity with text, and recency in the top twelve of 187 factors. Take both seriously; neither is a guarantee.
How do we ask a patient for a Google review without collecting a testimonial?
Ask about the visit and leave the dentistry out. A request that steers the patient toward praising the treatment is a request for a testimonial, whatever you call it. Asking about booking, reception, waiting time or how clearly things were explained collects comments you're allowed to reuse.
Is it legal to offer a discount or a prize draw for leaving a review?
Google's prohibited and restricted content policy rules out incentivised reviews, so it fails on the platform's rules before you even reach the National Law. Section 133 then adds its own limit on advertising an inducement without stating its terms.
Can we ask unhappy patients to contact us privately instead of leaving a review?
Inviting any patient to raise a problem with you directly is ordinary practice management. Sending unhappy patients to a private form while sending happy ones to Google is review gating. Google bans it, and AHPRA's 2018 media release warns that selective editing may break the law.
Should we turn off reviews on our Facebook page to stay compliant?
It removes a surface you control, along with any clinical comment posted there and the review volume that came with it. The alternative is watching the page and removing comments that refer to symptoms, diagnosis, treatment or outcome.
Why can our competitors show star ratings in Google and we cannot?
Star review snippets are separate from your Google Business Profile rating. Google's documentation rules out the self-serving case: if the business controls the reviews about itself, embedded widgets included, the page isn't eligible. Anyone selling review schema for stars on your own site is selling something Google has ruled out.
What do we do about a review that names a treatment and praises the outcome?
On Google, nothing. It isn't advertising you control, and AHPRA doesn't expect you to police it. Just don't screenshot it, quote it in a newsletter, or pull it onto your website through a widget.
How many Google reviews does a dental practice actually need?
There's no threshold, and any number you're quoted is made up. The survey evidence supports quantity of reviews with text, high ratings and recency all carrying weight. So aim for a steady flow and forget the target.
Reviews are one layer of your search presence, and they're rarely the only thing holding a practice back. Our fixed-price marketing audit looks at your review setup alongside the listing, the site and the advertising-compliance layer. And the marketing for dentists page explains how we scope the work for a practice.
This article describes publicly available regulatory requirements and platform policies. It is not legal advice. Verify against ahpra.gov.au before acting, particularly on the question of whether a given platform is advertising within your control, which depends on facts specific to your practice.
Sources
- AHPRA: Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service, issued 14 December 2020 (control test s3.2, testimonials s4.3)
- AHPRA: Testimonials: understand the requirements
- AHPRA: Advertising FAQs
- AHPRA: Selectively editing reviews or testimonials may break the law, 13 June 2018
- Google: Prohibited and restricted content
- Google: Tips to improve your local ranking
- Google: Review snippet structured data, updated 24 July 2026
- Whitespark: 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors, published 6 November 2025, 47 respondents scoring 187 factors
- BrightLocal: Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published 11 February 2026, 1,002 US adults
