What Changed in 2025–26: New Advertising and Privacy Rules Your Dental Website Is Judged Against

This guide flags items for your own review. It is not legal advice, and reading it (or running our checks) does not determine whether your practice is compliant or non-compliant with any law or guideline. For specific concerns, get independent legal or regulatory advice.

Four separate changes landed between September 2025 and December 2026. None of them were aimed at dentists specifically — and that's exactly why dental websites keep tripping over them: the copy was written before the rules existed, and nobody has been back to look.

Here they are in date order, each with the practical check.

1. September 2025 — cosmetic-procedure advertising guidelines (and yes, veneers are on the list)

Ahpra and the National Boards' guidelines for practitioners who advertise higher-risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures took effect on 2 September 2025. The list of higher-risk procedures explicitly includes dental veneers, alongside injectables and thread lifts.

For advertising those procedures, the guidelines require:

• Real, unedited images only. Filtered, airbrushed or otherwise enhanced photos should be replaced with unaltered ones — and "after" photos should be taken in similar conditions (lighting, angle, distance) to the "before".
• A visible "results may vary" warning wherever such imagery is used in advertising.
• No influencer promotion. The ban on testimonials from social-media influencers was strengthened — gifted-treatment posts promoted on your channels are a review item in themselves.
• Protections for under-18s, including targeted-advertising bans and a mandatory seven-day cooling-off period.

Check this week: open your veneers and smile-makeover pages. If there's a before/after gallery, ask three questions — are these images unedited, do they carry an individual-results warning, and is there any influencer or gifted content linked from the page? Remember the long-standing baseline still applies on top: testimonials about clinical outcomes have been prohibited in regulated health advertising under the National Law all along.

2. January 2026 — the TGA names cosmetic-procedure goods a priority

The Therapeutic Goods Administration's compliance principles for 2026–27 set out twelve priority focus areas, and one of them is therapeutic goods used in cosmetic procedures. Teeth-whitening gels, kits and strips are therapeutic goods — so the product side of your whitening page is regulated separately from the Ahpra side.

The TGA's advertising rules for therapeutic goods don't allow testimonials about the goods, and the regulator has flagged fake or misleading reviews — including AI-generated "deep fake" endorsements — as an enforcement focus, with particular scrutiny of websites and social media.

Check this week: look at your whitening page as two layers. The service (your clinical care) sits under Ahpra's advertising rules; the product (the gel, the branded kit you sell or name) sits under the TGA Advertising Code. Product testimonials, comparative product claims, and product before/afters are the items worth a careful look.