Most of the marketing claims that get Australian small businesses into trouble were not written by anyone trying to deceive. They were written by an owner in a hurry, or a designer filling a space in a layout, or someone building out a homepage at nine at night because the site had to go live on Monday.
That is worth knowing, because under Australian Consumer Law it makes no difference. The ACCC is explicit: “It makes no difference whether a business intends to mislead or not.” Good intentions are not a defence. The claim either holds up or it does not.
Here is what the ACCC actually publishes about marketing claims, reviews and social content — the parts that most often catch out businesses doing everything else right.
The test is the overall impression, not the fine print
Businesses tend to think of a disclaimer as a shield. It usually is not. The ACCC’s position is that fine print “must not conflict with the overall message of the advertisement.” If the headline says one thing and the asterisk quietly says the opposite, the asterisk does not rescue you — it is evidence that you knew.
The standard being applied is the general impression a reasonable consumer takes away. Not the most careful reading. Not the technically defensible one. What a normal person walking past your window, or scrolling past your post, would conclude.
The underlying rule is simple enough to keep in your head: any information or claim a business makes about its products or services must be accurate, truthful, and based on reasonable grounds.
Reviews and testimonials are where small businesses get caught
This is the area where the gap between common practice and the actual rules is widest. Three things in particular.
Writing your own reviews
The ACCC does not hedge: “It’s against the law for a business to create fake or misleading reviews or to arrange for others to do so.” That includes asking staff, family or friends to post as customers, and it includes buying them.
It is also enforced against businesses of ordinary size. In July 2015 the ACCC issued three infringement notices totalling $30,600 to Citymove Pty Ltd, a furniture removal company, over fabricated customer testimonials posted using fake identities. The ACCC’s reasoning at the time was that falsely generated ratings “may lead a consumer to purchase a business’s product or service under a mistaken belief about the popularity and perceived quality of the business, in preference to other businesses.”
That last clause matters. The people harmed are not only customers — they are the competitors down the road who did not fake anything.
Offering something for a review
Incentivised reviews are not banned outright, but there are two conditions most businesses do not meet. The incentive “must be applied regardless of whether the reviewer leaves a positive or negative review”, and the fact the review was incentivised must be clearly disclosed.
So a discount for “leaving us a 5-star review” fails both tests. A discount for “leaving us a review, good or bad”, disclosed as such, is a different proposition. The distinction is not cosmetic.
Deleting the bad ones
This is the one that surprises people most. The ACCC warns businesses against suppressing or editing negative reviews, and against removing genuine reviews that are negative — noting that doing so may itself be misleading conduct, because it leaves a review profile that misrepresents what customers actually experienced.
The ACCC points to a $2.9 million penalty against HealthEngine over suppressing negative reviews, and $600,000 against Service Seeking over a system that let businesses publish reviews on their own customers’ behalf.
Reporting a review that is fake, defamatory or breaches the platform’s own policies is a different act from quietly filtering out the ones you dislike. If you are actively managing your Google Business Profile, that distinction is the one to hold on to. Responding publicly and well to a fair criticism is almost always the better commercial move anyway — it is read by everyone who comes after.
“Was / now” pricing and the word “free”
Two specific traps the ACCC calls out by name.
On savings claims — the “WAS $275 NOW $149” construction — the claim becomes misleading if the product or service was never actually sold at the higher price, or was sold at that higher price only in a limited way immediately before the sale. An inflated “was” price invented to make the discount look better is the textbook version of this.
On “free” — an advertisement stating something is free while the fine print mentions extra payments is, in the ACCC’s words, likely to be misleading. If there is a condition attached, it belongs in the claim, not underneath it.
Both of these turn up constantly in small business marketing, usually in a promotional banner someone built quickly. They are worth a second look before anything goes to print.
You are responsible for what other people post on your page
This one genuinely catches businesses out. The ACCC states that businesses “are also responsible for comments and posts that others make on their social media pages which are false or likely to mislead”, and advises businesses to remove or respond to posts that may be false or misleading.
If a happy customer overstates what you do in a comment — claims a guarantee you do not offer, or a result you never promised — and it sits there unaddressed, that is your problem, not theirs.
The practical consequence is that an unmonitored business page is a small liability, not a neutral one. If you are running social media for a small business and cannot check comments regularly, that is a reason to run fewer channels properly rather than more channels badly.
The same applies to anyone posting on your behalf. Content a business incentivises an influencer or creator to make is held to the same standard as content the business writes itself.
Claims you cannot substantiate
Where you claim a particular quality or benefit, the ACCC’s position is that a business must be able to prove it. “Fastest”, “safest”, “non-toxic”, “number one”, “award-winning”, “trusted by hundreds of local families” — each of these is a factual assertion, and each needs something behind it.
This is the most common problem we see in website copy, and it is nearly always fixable without weakening the page. “The most reliable electrician in Berwick” is an unprovable superlative. “Same-day callouts across Berwick, Officer and Beaconsfield, seven days” is a specific, checkable promise — and it converts better, because it tells someone something they did not already assume you would say.
Vague superlatives are weak copy quite apart from being risky. Being made to write specifically is usually an improvement.
Silence can mislead as well
The last one is the least intuitive. The ACCC notes that silence can be misleading where a business withholds information a consumer needs to make a decision.
Leaving out the minimum term, the call-out fee, the fact that the advertised price applies to one variant only — these are omissions rather than statements, and they can still create a misleading overall impression. If a customer would feel misled on discovering it later, it probably belonged on the page.
A short check before content goes live
None of this requires a compliance department. Five questions cover most of it:
- If a customer read only the headline and never the fine print, would they be misled?
- Can I produce evidence for every factual claim on this page, today?
- Is every “was” price a price we genuinely charged?
- Is every review and testimonial from a real customer, unincentivised — or if incentivised, disclosed and offered regardless of rating?
- Has anyone read the comments on our posts this week?
We are a design and marketing agency, not a law firm, and none of this is legal advice. For anything specific — a claim you are unsure about, or a letter you have received — talk to a lawyer. The ACCC’s own guidance is free, clear, and better than most of what gets repeated second-hand.
Why this sits with the content work
Almost all of this gets decided while copy is being written, not afterwards. A superlative goes into a headline because the space looked empty. A testimonial gets tidied up for length and stops being what the customer said. A promotional price gets a “was” figure attached to make the maths look better.
When we write website copy and content for businesses across Pakenham, Officer, Berwick, Narre Warren and the rest of Melbourne’s south-east, part of the job is replacing the claims that cannot be backed with the specific ones that can. That is a compliance improvement and a copywriting improvement at the same time — specific beats superlative on almost every page we have ever tested.
If you have a site with claims on it you are not certain you could substantiate, or you have been deleting negative reviews on the assumption that was normal practice, we are happy to take a look and tell you plainly if there is nothing to worry about. Email contact@madexify.com or call +61 424 485 087.
Sources: ACCC — False or misleading claims; ACCC — Online reviews for products and services; ACCC — Social media promotions; ACCC — Removalist company pays penalties for alleged false or misleading online testimonials. Accessed 2 September 2026.
