Dental practice website: what you can say (and what you can't)

Anyone searching for «dental practice website: what you can and cannot say» has usually already grasped the hard part, that health advertising doesn't work like advertising for a shop, and wants to know exactly where the line sits before writing the first page. The answer doesn't come from industry practice but from two precise, overlapping sources: Italy's 2019 budget law and the Medical Code of Ethics, which applies to dentists too because, under law no. 3 of 11 January 2018, physicians and dentists share the same professional board (the Order of Physicians and Dentists) and the same national federation, FNOMCeO. Under Article 56 of the Code, a dental practice's website can contain only four types of information, listed exhaustively: professional qualifications and specializations, professional activity, the characteristics of the service, and fees. What falls outside those four categories is the point worth pausing on before publishing, not after.

One necessary caveat: this isn't legal advice, and it doesn't replace an opinion from your local Dental Board Commission, the body with authority to assess a specific case. It's a reading of the text of these two public, verifiable sources, meant to clarify what's at stake before asking for a targeted opinion.

Two sources that say the same thing

Article 1, paragraph 525, of law no. 145 of 30 December 2018 states that informational communications from private healthcare facilities and from members of healthcare professional boards, dentists included, "may contain only the information (...) necessary to guarantee the safety of medical treatments, excluding any promotional or suggestive element, in respect of the patient's free and informed decision." This is a statutory provision, so it's binding on everyone, not only on those registered with a professional board.

The FNOMCeO's Medical Code of Ethics, in its 2014 edition with the 2016 amendments still in force, reaches the same conclusion through a different mechanism. Article 55 requires physicians, and therefore dentists too, to promote "accessible, transparent, rigorous and prudent health information", avoiding "direct or indirect advertising of their own professional activity" when collaborating with public or private bodies on health communication. Article 56 is the one that gets specific about websites: health-related informational advertising, spread through any means, "has as its exclusive subject matter professional qualifications and specializations, professional activity, the characteristics of the service offered and fees for services", and must always be "truthful, accurate and relevant to the subject of the information, never equivocal, misleading or derogatory" (text quoted from an official letter by the National Dental Board Commission of the FNOMCeO, October 2022, consulted on 22 October 2026).

The word that carries the most weight in this article is "exclusive". It isn't a list of examples, it's a closed list. Whatever content on the website doesn't clearly fit one of those four categories falls, under the text of the rule, outside the permitted scope.

The four categories, in practice

Translated onto a practice's website, the four categories cover most of what a patient actually needs to know before booking a visit: the dentist's degree and specializations, the areas they treat (orthodontics, implants, conservative dentistry), the concrete characteristics of the service (hours, equipment, how to book, whether sedation is available), and the cost of treatments. That last point is, of the four, the one where the rule is more permissive than you'd expect from a regulated sector: publishing fees isn't banned, it's explicitly allowed.

Describing a technology genuinely in use, such as a digital diagnostic system, also fits within the characteristics of the service offered, as long as it stays descriptive rather than turning into a promise of outcome: it's the same caution I wrote about regarding a US case on AI-generated dental treatment plans, where the problem wasn't the technology itself but the isolated number used to sell it.

What falls outside

What doesn't fit the four categories, and what Article 56 explicitly bans when it refers to advertising that is "equivocal, misleading or derogatory", includes unverifiable value judgments ("the best practice in the city"), promises of outcome ("a perfect smile, guaranteed"), and comparisons with other practices or professionals. On this last point the rule is specific, not generic: comparative advertising is allowed only "in the presence of measurable clinical indicators, certain and shared by the scientific community, that allow for a non-misleading comparison." An implicit comparison, or ranking-style language, without those indicators, doesn't meet that condition.

The same caution applies to unvalidated innovations: Article 56 bans spreading "news of advances in biomedical research and of innovations in healthcare not yet scientifically validated and accredited", especially when they risk fueling "unfounded expectations and illusory hopes" in the patient reading them.

What happens if it isn't respected

Article 1, paragraph 536, of the same law 145/2018 sets out two paths, which aren't mutually exclusive. Local professional boards, including on a report from the national federation, can open disciplinary proceedings against the professional or the registered company. At the same time, the same violations can be reported to Italy's communications authority, which has jurisdiction over any administrative sanctions. Deciding on the merits, whether a specific piece of content actually breaches the ethics rules, is up to the board with territorial jurisdiction over where the practice is based: that's the body to ask for a preventive opinion on a text that raises doubts, before publishing it rather than after.

Where to start

Before writing the site's copy, it's worth running every page through the four allowed categories and, for every sentence that doesn't clearly fit, asking whether it's describing a verifiable fact or promising an outcome. Beyond this content filter, a dental practice is still subject to the same disclosure obligations as any other business with a website, such as the mandatory data on VAT number, registered office and business register, which depend on the legal form of the business, not the sector it operates in. If you'd like a second opinion on how to structure your practice's website content before writing it, get in touch: it won't replace an opinion from your Dental Board Commission on ethics compliance, but I can help you build the rest of the site around that boundary.