Advertising compliance screening for agencies with clinic clients.
Health advertising in Australia is governed by rules that sit across several documents, get updated without much fanfare, and rarely make it into a copy brief. Scriptline reads your clients' public pages against the current TGA and Ahpra guidance and tells you which sentences a reviewer would stop on. Every finding comes with the sentence itself, the rule behind it, and a link to the source, so you can check my work rather than trust it.
Run by one person in Sydney. Replies come from me, usually same day.
- Covers
- TGA & Ahpra advertising guidance
- Reads
- Public web pages and public archives
- Grades
- Five confidence tiers, A to E
- Returns
- A PDF you can forward to a client
- Based
- Sydney, New South Wales
Page text — invented sample
Sample Health Co. is a doctor-led telehealth service supporting patients across Australia.
Our practitioners prescribe medicinal cannabis for eligible patients living with chronic pain, anxiety and sleep conditions. Studies show it reduces pain and helps patients lower their opioid dose.
Complete our two-minute eligibility check and receive an e-script delivered to your door within 24 hours. No referral needed.
We also offer wrinkle-reducing injections from $9 per unit. Results guaranteed, or your next treatment is free.
Sample Health Co. does not advocate the use of therapeutic goods that have not been assessed by the TGA. Information on this page is for educational purposes only.
Findings 0
The page above is invented for this demonstration. It is not any real clinic's copy, and "Sample Health Co." is not a real business. Tier letters and rule codes such as A5 or T1 are Scriptline's own internal references. The citation is the linked source, never the code.
Names a prescription-only medicine, or makes a therapeutic claim about one.
Restricted representation, or supply framing around a prescription pathway.
Pricing, inducement and cosmetic-procedure presentation issues.
Low-confidence wording worth knowing about. Listed, never escalated.
Matched a rule, then ruled out on review. Reported with the reason.
Issued by the TGA in one enforcement action in 2023 against six businesses and two individuals over medicinal cannabis advertising. It is one batch, not the running total. TGA media release
The National Boards' guidelines for advertising higher risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures commenced, administered by Ahpra. Read the guidelines
Roughly how long it takes to check any single finding I send you, because the quote and the source link are both on the line.
What the screen looks for
Three categories that a find-and-replace misses.
Obvious breaches are easy and rare. What actually turns up in a portfolio is a substitute word chosen because it isn't the banned one, a therapeutic claim sitting inside a patient testimonial, and a line written years ago that nobody has re-read since.
References to prescription-only medicines
Trade names and active substances, plus the indirect categories the TGA has said may draw a consumer's mind to a Schedule 4 or Schedule 8 good.
- Substitute terms and euphemisms
- Abbreviations, hashtags, deliberate misspellings
- Page titles and meta descriptions as well as body copy
Restricted representations and prohibited language
Read against the National Boards' guidelines for advertising higher risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures, alongside published TGA advertising guidance.
- Safety claims and guaranteed outcomes
- Testimonials and before-and-after imagery
- Inducements, price framing, youth-targeting signals
When the wording first appeared
Public archive snapshots show roughly when a line went up and whether it has been there since. Useful mostly for triage: a paragraph written in 2022 usually predates the guidance it now sits awkwardly against, and that changes how you'd fix it.
- Read from public archives, not from anyone's server
- Reported only where snapshots actually exist
- Left out entirely rather than estimated
The actual checklist
Fourteen categories, roughly 140 individual patterns in the current rule set. Anything matched is quoted back to you with the rule and the source, so you can disagree with it on the spot.
How it works
Four steps, and you only do two of them.
No onboarding call, no discovery workshop, no portal to log into.
You send a list of domains
A pasted list is fine. If you'd rather start with one site to see whether the findings are any good, that one is free.
Your side: two minutesI screen every public page
Each page is read against the current rule set. Matches are graded, quoted, and checked against the surrounding copy so disclaimers aren't counted as breaches.
My side: a few daysI review every match by hand
I open the pages. Anything that doesn't survive a human read is marked as cleared and stays in the report with the reason.
My side: the slow partYou get a PDF you can forward
Grouped by site and by the edit that fixes it, written so a copywriter can work from it. Plus a short note on what I'd do first.
Your side: read it, argue with itThe report
Most of the work is deciding what to leave out.
Generating a long list of alarming matches is easy, and useless. The number that matters is how many of them still stand after someone reads the page they came from.
Cleared matches are in the report too
Where a site carries a compliant disclaimer, or correctly explains that it can't name a product, the match is listed as suppressed with the reason. My false-positive rate is as visible to you as my findings are.
A source link on every line
Each rule carries a confidence tier and a link to the TGA or Ahpra material behind it. If something doesn't hold up, you'll see that in under a minute, and I'd want to know about it. That's how the rule set gets better.
Written for whoever has to fix it
Findings are grouped by site and by the edit that resolves them, so a copywriter can work from the report directly. No legal glossary required.
Prescription-only medicine named outright
2 sites · Tier A · quoted, with source link
Substitute term standing in for a substance
2 sites · Tier A/B · a pattern the TGA has described
Minor wording, no action recommended
23 sites · Tier D/E · listed, not escalated
Matched, then cleared on review
Compliant disclaimers · reported as suppressed, with reasons
Unreachable when screened
Reported as unreachable. An unreachable site isn't a clear one.
Who I work with
The report goes to my client and nowhere else.
Scriptline sends findings to the organisation that engaged it, and to no one else. I don't contact clinics, patients, competitors or regulators, and I don't report anyone to anyone — whether or not they're a paying client. If that ever changed I'd say so here first.
Marketing and web agencies
With health, clinic, cosmetic or telehealth clients, where copy decisions are made in your studio and reviewed on your timeline.
Insurers and brokers
Professional indemnity in the medical and cosmetic space, where advertising conduct comes up at underwriting.
Networks and industry bodies
Franchise groups, practice networks and associations screening a member base rather than one site.
Udith Hasanga
Operator, Scriptline · Sydney, New South Wales
Scriptline started as a script. I wanted to know whether the advertising rules that apply to Australian health services could be written down precisely enough for software to check a page against them, so I sat with the TGA advertising guidance and the Ahpra guidelines and turned them into an explicit rule set, one clause at a time.
Most of the work since has been the unglamorous half: making it wrong less often. The first version flagged compliance disclaimers as if they were breaches, and it missed plural forms of the exact phrases it was written to catch. Both of those were found by deliberately attacking my own findings before anyone saw them, which is now a standing step rather than an occasional one.
That's why the report shows you what it cleared. A screening tool that only shows its hits is asking you to take its accuracy on trust, and I'd rather hand you the means to check it. There's no team behind this, no account manager, and no sales process. You email me, I answer.
Pricing
Two numbers, both on the page.
Start with the audit. The monthly only makes sense afterwards, once you've seen whether the findings were any good.
Portfolio audit
$1,200 one-off · portfolios up to 40 sitesA full screen of the client sites you manage, written up as a report you can forward to a client without editing it first. Larger books quoted before I start.
- Every finding quoted, tiered and linked
- Suppressed matches listed with reasons
- Archive history where snapshots exist
- PDF, usually within a week
Ongoing screening
$600 per month · same portfolioThe same screen re-run monthly against a change log, so new copy gets looked at close to when it goes live.
- Monthly re-screen, changes flagged
- New pages picked up as they appear
- Rule set updated as guidance moves
- Month to month, cancel any time
Scriptline is a sole trader and isn't registered for GST, so these figures are the totals you'd pay. Invoices are issued as "Invoice" with no GST line, which also means there's no input tax credit for your finance team to claim. Worth knowing before you put it through procurement.
Scope, plainly
- A portfolio audit covers up to 40 sites. Beyond that I'll quote before starting, not after.
- Each site is screened across its publicly reachable pages. Login-protected and practitioner-only areas are not accessed.
- Turnaround is usually within a week of getting the domain list. If it's going to be longer, you'll hear that before you pay.
- The fee covers finding and explaining. Rewriting the copy is separate, and I'll quote it if you want it.
- Social posts and paid ads aren't included by default. Ask and I'll price them in.
- Monthly screening is month to month. Cancel whenever, no notice period, no exit fee.
- If a finding turns out to be wrong, tell me and I'll correct the report and the rule. That costs you nothing.
Questions
The things agencies actually ask.
Isn't advertising compliance the clinic's problem, not ours?
Mostly, yes. The clinic is the advertiser and carries the primary obligation, and under Australian Consumer Law an agency that simply prepares material is generally not liable as a principal.
The practical exposure is usually commercial rather than legal. If a client has to pull or rewrite pages your studio produced, the conversation about who pays for that rework is not a comfortable one, and it tends to happen at renewal time. That's the risk this is really aimed at.
Can't we just check this ourselves?
You can, and for a single page you probably should. It stops being practical across a book of client sites, because the rules sit in several separate documents, they change without much announcement, and the hard cases are judgement calls about the overall impression a page creates rather than a banned word you can search for.
If reading the guidance yourself is the outcome, that's a fine outcome. The TGA advertising guidance and the Ahpra cosmetic advertising guidelines are both public.
Do you contact our clients?
No. Never, and not afterwards either. The report goes to whoever commissioned it and to nobody else. I don't approach the clinics on your client list, I don't report anyone to a regulator, and I don't publish or reuse what I find.
What if we disagree with a finding?
Then one of us learns something. Every finding quotes the page and links to the source, specifically so you can push back in about ten seconds. If you're right, I correct the report and fix the rule that produced it, at no cost.
This happens. The rule set is version 0.2 for a reason, and it improves fastest when somebody who knows the client's context tells me I'm wrong.
Will this tell us our client is breaking the law?
No, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. Findings are matters requiring review. Whether a contravention has occurred is decided by the TGA, by a National Board through Ahpra, by a tribunal or court, or sometimes by a state complaints body.
I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice. Where something looks like it genuinely needs one, I'll say so rather than guess.
Do you fix the copy as well?
The audit finds and explains. Rewriting is separate work and I'll quote it if you want it, though most agencies would rather their own writers do it — the report is written so they can.
What don't you cover?
Publicly reachable web pages and public archives only. Not social posts or paid ads unless you ask for them, not anything behind a login, not clinical governance, accreditation, privacy or practice compliance, and not print or broadcast material.
How new is this?
New. Scriptline started in 2026 and I'd rather tell you that than have you work it out. What I'd offer instead of a client list is the free single-site scan and the sample report — both let you judge the work rather than the track record.
Limits of this service
What screening can and can't tell you.
Findings indicate matters requiring review. They are not determinations of breach. Whether a contravention has occurred is decided by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, by a National Board through Ahpra, by a tribunal or court, or in some cases by a state complaints body. Not by me, and not by a script.
Automated screening is indicative only and every match needs human review in context. Scriptline does not provide legal advice and is not a law firm. Where a finding raises a question that needs one, get a lawyer.
Scriptline is an independent private business. It has no affiliation with, endorsement from, or authority on behalf of the TGA, Ahpra or any regulator.
Screening covers publicly accessible web pages and public archives. It obeys robots.txt, runs rate limited, and identifies itself with a contactable user agent in your server logs.
Tier letters and rule codes are Scriptline's own internal references, not citations to any published instrument. The citation is always the linked source.
Free single-site scan
Send me one domain.
Pick the client site you'd least like to be surprised by. I'll screen it and send back what I find, at no charge and with nothing attached. It's the quickest way to judge whether any of this is worth your money.
Prefer email? hello@scriptline.com.au