Very few small businesses set out to run a misleading ad.
The ones that get in trouble almost never lied. They ran a true-ish claim with a missing qualifier, a price that was accurate three months ago, or a review they were given by someone they had done a favour for. None of that feels like deception from the inside, and all of it is judged the same way.
Here is the standard, then the five rules that catch most of it.
The test is the impression, not the sentence
Australian Consumer Law judges an advertisement by its overall impression on an ordinary, reasonable member of the target audience. Not on whether each individual sentence is defensible. Not on what the small print says.
Two consequences that matter for how you write ads:
Small print does not fix a headline. If the headline creates an impression the conditions contradict, the conditions do not cure it — they are evidence you knew.
Silence can mislead. Leaving something out that a reasonable customer would need in order to understand what they are getting is treated the same as saying something untrue.
And it applies to business-to-business advertising as well, which surprises people who assume the rules are for consumer marketing.
The five that catch most of it
1. Prices must be a total. The advertised price has to include GST and any compulsory charges, shown as a single prominent figure. Quoting a component price without the total alongside it is the most common breach in small-business advertising, and it is entirely avoidable. If a price varies by location or condition, say so — and if you display two prices, you must supply at the lower one.
2. “From $X” has to be genuinely available. Advertising a price you cannot actually supply, in a reasonable quantity, for a reasonable period is bait advertising. “While stocks last” does not rescue a token quantity, and you are expected to be able to show the stock or capacity you had grounds to expect.
3. “Was” prices need history. A struck-through price, a “50% off” or a “was $X, now $Y” requires evidence that the higher price was the genuine selling price for a substantial recent period. Regulator practice looks for real sales at that price and several months of history. Fake discounting is an explicit ACCC enforcement priority, and it has produced penalties.
4. “Free” means free. No hidden cost, no uplift on the paid portion to compensate, and any condition — a sign-up, a minimum term, a required purchase, postage — disclosed next to the word rather than further down the page.
5. Reviews and ratings must be real and current. Not incentivised without disclosure, not written by you, not curated to show only positives while implying the rating is representative, and not left on the page two years after the number changed. “4.9 on Google” is a factual claim about a number that moves.
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The distinction that decides most borderline copy is puffery versus a checkable fact. “Great service” is puffery and is fine — nobody can verify it, and nobody reasonably treats it as a measurement. “Best-rated plumber in the Hills District” is a checkable claim, and it needs a named source, a date and a scope. The moment a superlative becomes something a customer could look up, it stops being marketing language and becomes a representation you have to be able to support.
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The rule underneath all five
No claim without a file behind it.
Every specific claim you make must be true and substantiable at the time you make it. Forward-looking claims — “will save you 30%”, “guaranteed results in 60 days” — need documented reasonable grounds at the moment they are published, not a hope that it works out.
Practically, that means keeping the evidence with the ad and dating it: the price history, the invoice, the certificate, the consent for the testimonial, the screenshot of the rating and when it was taken. It is boring and it is the whole defence.
What changes on 1 July 2027
A new unfair trading practices regime passed Parliament in 2026 and takes effect 1 July 2027. Three parts of it matter to small businesses selling online:
Drip pricing. Transaction-based fees and charges must be displayed clearly and unambiguously near the base price. Booking fees, card surcharges, admin fees and delivery charges that appear progressively through a checkout are the specific target.
Subscriptions. Businesses with ongoing memberships will have to provide a straightforward way to cancel. Gyms are named explicitly in the commentary, but it covers any recurring arrangement.
Dark patterns. Conduct that manipulates or unreasonably distorts a customer’s decision-making and causes detriment. Countdown timers that reset, fake stock warnings, and checkout flows designed to make declining difficult.
Penalties under the broader regime are substantial — for a corporation, the greater of $100 million, three times the benefit obtained, or 30% of adjusted turnover during the breach period.
Twelve months is plenty of time to fix a pricing display. It is not much time to change a pricing model, which is why it is worth looking now rather than in June 2027.
The ten-minute self-check
Open your highest-spending ad and its landing page side by side.
- Is the price a total, including GST and any compulsory fee, and is it the most prominent price on the page?
- If there is a “from” price, could you supply at it today?
- If there is a “was” price, can you produce the sales history?
- If the word “free” appears, is every condition next to it?
- Is every rating, review count and superlative current, sourced and dated?
- Does the landing page say the same thing as the ad, or has one of them been edited since?
That last one catches more than the other five combined in our experience, and it is not a legal problem to begin with — it is just two people editing two things at different times.
General information about advertising rules, not legal advice. If a claim is central to how you sell, get it reviewed properly.
Cosmos Web Tech runs Google Ads and builds websites for Western Sydney and Hills District small businesses. Managed IT comes from Cloud Geeks, apps from Awesome Apps, and we are part of Ganda Tech Services.