Reviews You Are Not Allowed to Ask For

Why this differs from ordinary advertising

General advertising rules require claims to be truthful and not misleading, and testimonials are ordinarily permitted.

Regulated professions sit under an additional layer: a college, law society or professional body with its own advertising standards.

Those standards are frequently stricter, they apply to the individual practitioner as well as the practice, and they are enforced through professional discipline rather than through advertising complaints.

Which means the consequence of getting it wrong is a different order of thing entirely, and it is worth checking properly rather than reasoning from what other local businesses appear to do.

What follows is a general description of why this exists and what to check. It is not advice about your specific obligations.

Why regulators restrict them

The reasoning is worth understanding, because it explains where the lines fall.

A patient or client is not well placed to judge the technical quality of professional work. A testimonial saying somebody was excellent is an assessment of manner and outcome rather than of competence.

Individual outcomes also vary, and a positive account can imply a result that cannot be promised.

There is a vulnerability dimension, since somebody who has just received care or a favourable outcome is not in a neutral position to be asked for a public endorsement.

And confidentiality cuts across it, since a review confirms publicly that somebody was a patient or a client.

Professions where this commonly applies

• Health professions generally, with rules varying by college and province.
• Legal services, under law society advertising rules.
• Regulated financial advice, where claims about outcomes are constrained.
• Some allied and complementary practices, depending on registration.

The variation matters. Two practitioners in the same building, registered with different bodies, can have genuinely different obligations.

Which is why the only reliable answer comes from your own regulator rather than from a general article such as this one.

What is usually restricted

The pattern across most such rules, though the detail differs.

Soliciting testimonials from patients or clients, which is frequently prohibited outright rather than merely discouraged.

Publishing testimonials about clinical or professional services, on your own site or elsewhere.

Claims about outcomes, success rates, or being better than other practitioners.

And anything that could exploit vulnerability, which covers asking at the point of care.

What is frequently permitted: factual information about services offered, qualifications held, availability and fees charged.

A worked example

A clinic that added a review request to its appointment follow-up message, on the advice of a marketing supplier who worked mostly with trades.

It produced a steady flow of positive reviews and a complaint to the relevant college within about four months.

The outcome was a requirement to remove the testimonials, stop the requests, and a period of correspondence that occupied a good deal of the practice manager's time.

No harm had been intended and none was found, and the process was still a serious distraction and a mark on the file.

The supplier had not been dishonest. They had applied ordinary small business practice to a regulated profession without checking whether it transferred.

The check would have taken an hour.

Reviews you did not ask for

A genuine grey area worth handling carefully.

Somebody may leave a public review of a regulated practice without being asked, and the practice did not solicit it.

Whether that creates an obligation, and whether you may reply to it, varies. Some guidance treats unsolicited reviews as outside the restriction; some restricts responding because a reply confirms the relationship.

Which is another reason to read your own guidance carefully, since the ordinary instinct to reply politely can itself be the problem.

What is generally safe is not repeating or promoting the review, and not quoting it on your own materials.

The counter-case

Where this does not apply.

Unregulated services, which is most of the economy, where ordinary review practice is fine.

The business side of a regulated practice: reviews about parking, reception, waiting times and administration are frequently treated differently from reviews about professional services.

And business-to-business work by a regulated professional, which may sit under different provisions than work with individuals.

Those distinctions are real and they are also exactly the sort of thing worth confirming rather than assuming from a general description.

What to do instead

The restrictions remove one tool and leave several.

Clear factual information about qualifications, registration, experience and areas of focus.

Plain explanation of what happens, what it costs, and how long it takes, which builds confidence without any endorsement.

Professional memberships and teaching or publication, where relevant.

And referral relationships with other practitioners, which for many regulated professions produce more work than any public review would.

All of those are permitted, effective, and frequently more persuasive to the audience that actually matters for a regulated practice than any testimonial would be.

Third-party platforms you do not control

The practical complication, since listings exist whether you want them or not.

A map listing, a directory entry or a review platform may carry reviews of a regulated practice that nobody in the practice created or asked for.

You generally cannot have those removed simply because your regulator restricts testimonials, since the platform is not bound by your professional rules.

What you can control is whether you solicit them, whether you respond, and whether you repeat them anywhere you do control.

Which means the compliance question is about your conduct rather than about what exists on the internet, and that distinction is usually the reassuring part of the guidance.

Where a listing carries something genuinely defamatory or clearly false, that is a separate matter with its own route, and it is worth taking advice rather than acting quickly.

The hour worth spending

1. Find your regulator's advertising or marketing guidance.
2. Read what it says about testimonials specifically.
3. Check whether responding to unsolicited reviews is addressed.
4. Check the rules on outcome claims.
5. Tell any supplier working on your marketing what the constraints are.
6. Ask the regulator directly if anything is unclear, which is usually welcomed.

The fifth prevents the most common cause of the whole problem, which is a supplier applying ordinary small business practice in perfectly good faith.

The ordinary version of this subject is covered in the moment to ask for a review.

Frequently asked questions

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