GDC-compliant dental websites: what the rules actually require

“GDC-compliant dental website” is searched constantly, and most of what comes back either tries to sell a compliance audit or gestures vaguely at “following the rules” without saying what they are. There's no badge the General Dental Council hands out and no plugin that makes a site compliant on its own. There is, however, a specific, public set of requirements — the GDC's own guidance, plus the advertising rules the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) applies alongside it. Once you know what they actually say, checking your own site takes about ten minutes.

What “GDC-compliant” actually means

The GDC regulates dental professionals rather than websites directly, but its published guidance on advertising sets out what every dentist and dental care professional must do whenever they market their services — and a website is advertising. “Compliant” simply means the site does what that guidance requires: displays certain information, avoids certain kinds of claim, and is upfront about what patients are getting. It sits alongside the separate rules the ASA enforces for advertising generally, dental included.

The guidance covers any GDC registrant who advertises, not only dentists — hygienists, therapists, orthodontists and clinical dental technicians are all included. On a mixed-discipline practice site, that means every named professional's page needs checking individually, not just the dentists'.

What your website must display

This is the part most guides skip. The GDC's guidance is specific about the information a professional's advertising, including a website, has to carry:

None of this is hard to add — it's usually a paragraph in the footer and a line on the team page. What trips practices up isn't difficulty; it's that nobody worked through the list.

What you can and can't say

The GDC's standard is that advertising must be accurate and evidenced, and must not create, in its words, “an unjustified expectation about the results you can achieve.” That rules out language implying a guaranteed outcome. It also protects specialist titles: only a dentist on the GDC's specialist list can call themselves a “specialist” or use a title like “orthodontist.” Everyone else can honestly say “a special interest in” or “experienced in” — true, without borrowing a status they don't hold.

The same evidence standard runs through the ASA's rules for dental advertising generally: any objective claim needs something behind it. If a page says a treatment is “pain-free” or “guaranteed,” that's a claim someone could ask you to substantiate, so it belongs on the page only if it's true for every patient — not just the ones it worked out well for.

NHS, mixed, or private — say it plainly

Where a practice offers both NHS and private treatment, the GDC's guidance is clear that patients shouldn't be left to discover what's available where, or steered toward private care when the same treatment is available on the NHS. For a website, that's one plain line stating which you are, rather than something worked out at the front desk after the fact. It's a small piece of copy that avoids a genuinely awkward conversation later.

Before-and-after photos, and reviews

Both come up constantly, and both are allowed, within limits. The ASA's guidance for dental advertising requires before-and-after images to be genuine and representative of a typical result, never exaggerated or manipulated — and you need to hold signed, dated proof that the images are real and that you have permission to use them.

Reviews sit under a separate, general ASA testimonials and endorsements rule: any factual claim inside a review must not mislead, and marketers must hold documentary evidence that a testimonial is genuine, unless it's obviously fictitious. In practice, that means a review can't be used to say something your own website wouldn't be allowed to say directly.

GDC-compliant isn't a badge you display. It's a defined list of specific things, done accurately, every time the site changes.

What happens if you get it wrong

Most compliance gaps aren't dramatic. It's usually a missing GDC number, a last-updated line nobody's touched in years, or a review that was never checked before it went live. Genuine breaches sit within the GDC's wider fitness-to-practise framework, but the day-to-day risk is simpler: a site that skips the basics reads as unprofessional to the patients reading it, and an unevidenced claim is exactly the kind of thing a patient — or a competitor — can report. Treating this as routine maintenance, checked at build and again whenever the site changes, costs far less than treating it as a crisis later.

A quick self-check

Before paying anyone to audit your site, you can check most of this yourself in about ten minutes:

• Can a visitor find every named dentist's GDC number without hunting for it?
• Does the site say clearly whether you're NHS, mixed, or private?
• Is there a complaints procedure, and a link to the GDC?
• Would every claim on the page survive being asked “can you prove that?”
• Are your before-and-after photos genuine patients, with consent on file?

If any answer is no, it's usually a small fix, not a rebuild — worth getting right alongside the fundamentals in our guide to what actually makes a dental website book patients, rather than retrofitting it later.

Where this fits into a build

We build this checklist into every dental site from day one — the GDC number, the complaints procedure, the NHS/private line, evidence-checked copy — rather than adding it as an afterthought. If you're weighing up a build and want the honest numbers, our guide to UK dental website pricing covers the ranges. And if part of the build is an AI assistant answering patient questions, the same evidence discipline applies there too: see what a safe AI patient assistant should and shouldn't do.