Visible within the rules: what an insurance broker's pages can state

What staying within the rules means for a broker's website

A broker's website may count as advertising where you are licensed, and the rules on what advertising must and must not say differ between countries, states and provinces. This article does not say what any of them require. It separates what a brokerage can state about itself as fact from the decisions that belong to the regulator or to counsel, and nothing in it is legal advice.

The two aims point the same way. An AI assistant answering with web search on can quote what it fetched, so a page of checkable facts is both what a buyer's question needs and what is safest to have repeated. If an answer quotes your page, it quotes what is there, including a line the rules would not have allowed. Put nothing on the page you would not want read back to a buyer or a regulator.

The facts a brokerage can state about itself

Each row below is a fact the firm already holds in writing, in a license, an agreement or a procedure. The page states it in that document's words, and the markup, where there is any, repeats the page. Stated the same way everywhere, these facts are also what lets a machine read the firm as one entity; the rest of what a brokerage publishes is on the insurance brokers overview.

Licenses, written the way the licensing body writes them

A license is the fact a buyer is least able to judge and most able to check, if the page lets them. Give the license class exactly as the licensing body words it, not a shortened or translated version, then the number, the jurisdiction and the holder. Where the body has a public lookup, link it: the person's own entry if entries have stable addresses, the search page if they do not.

Keep the list to what is held now. A lapsed license comes off the page the day it lapses, a renewed one gets its new dates, and a producer who leaves the firm leaves the page that week. A shortcut such as "licensed in every state" or "fully licensed" gives nobody anything to check; the list does.

In the structured data, a person's license can be a Certification attached with hasCertification: issuedBy names the licensing body, certificationIdentification carries the license number, and validIn gives the jurisdiction. On the Person node, sameAs can point at that person's lookup entry. Everything in it repeats the visible list, which is what Google's structured data guidelines ask of markup: that it describe the visible page and not mislead.

How you are paid, and how a client complains

Two pages carry facts that buyers ask about and that disclosure rules may govern. The pay page says, in the words your license and agreements use, whether the firm is paid by commission from the insurer, by a fee from the client, or both, whether the amount can differ between insurers, and where a client can see the details for their own policy. The exact wording, and whether anything more must appear, is for counsel.

The complaints page sets out a route a client can follow without having to call anyone first:

1. Write to [address or email], or call [number], saying what went wrong and which policy it concerns.
2. [Role] acknowledges the complaint within [time] and handles it from there.
3. The firm gives a written answer within [time], with its reasons.
4. A client who is not satisfied can take it to [the outside body, named as it names itself] at [link], where one exists for your license.

Put both pages in HTML, not only in a PDF. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros, late August to early September 2026), 2.1% of sites kept their real content, a price list or a service menu, in a PDF. That figure covers the whole sample, and a document a fetcher may never open is a poor home for facts a buyer or a regulator comes looking for.

Questions to take to the regulator or counsel before publishing

These are questions, not answers, because the answers differ by jurisdiction and change over time. Take each one to whoever clears your advertising, and keep their answer with the page it concerns:

• Does the website count as advertising where we are licensed, and what must every page carry as a result?
• Which disclosures must appear, in what words, and where on the page?
• May the firm describe itself as independent, as a broker, as a specialist or as an expert?
• May insurers be named, or their logos shown?
• May testimonials, reviews or ratings appear, and on what conditions?
• May the firm state premiums, savings or comparisons, and with what qualifications?
• What records of each published version must be kept, and for how long?

Asking first costs less than correcting later, because a correction has to reach every copy of the fact: the page, the markup, each listing, and anything that has already quoted it.

Testimonials and reviews where the rules restrict them

Where the rules restrict testimonials, the site carries none. Reviews clients leave on independent platforms stay on those platforms: not quoted on your pages, not embedded in a widget, not marked up. Nothing else in this article depends on them, and the facts in the table above give an answer plenty to say about a brokerage without a single testimonial.

Where testimonials are allowed, they go on the page as text, with the reviewer's first name, the date and the platform, and whatever conditions your rules attach.

Markup is a separate question with the same answer either way. Google's review snippet rules say ratings must come directly from users and may not be aggregated from other websites, exclude fake reviews and undisclosed incentivized ones, and make a business that controls the reviews about itself ineligible for review stars. So no rating markup built from a platform's reviews goes on the firm's pages.

An approval routine that keeps the pages true

• Give one person the pages in this set: licenses, pay, complaints, and the markets statement on each line page.
• Route every change through whoever clears your advertising before it goes live, and note who approved it and when.
• Keep a dated copy of each version that was published.
• Put license renewal dates in a calendar, and on each one check the licenses page against the licensing body's lookup.
• When a producer joins or leaves, change the about page and the licenses page that week.
• Once a year, read every page in the set against the licenses and agreements it describes, and update the last-reviewed date.
• When a fact changes, change the pages first, then the markup and every listing, on the same day.

The same routine serves a repeated reading of AI answers, which needs a dated log of what changed on the site so that a change in the answers can be set against it. The panel for that reading is in what being named means for a broker, and the scoring behind it is on our methodology page.