The ACCC just told your customers not to trust how a website looks

The ACCC has warned that generative AI has made it cheap and easy to spin up convincing fake online stores, complete with professional-looking sites, product photography and reviews, reported by SmartCompany. The regulator took action against four of these ghost stores last year, and around ten more shut down in December 2025 after it went to Shopify and Meta. Formal complaints run to the hundreds, and the ACCC reckons the real number is well above that.

Buried in the warning is a sentence that should stop any business owner with a website. The ACCC’s position is that “consumers can no longer rely on appearance alone” when working out whether a business is legitimate.

Sit with that for a second, because it is a strange thing to be told after fifteen years of being advised to look professional.

Looking good has stopped being proof

For most of the internet’s commercial life, a polished website was a reasonable proxy for a real business. Not a perfect one, but decent. Making a site that looked credible took money, or time, or a person who knew what they were doing, and that cost did most of the filtering.

Generative AI has removed the cost. Someone with no design skill can produce a storefront in an afternoon that looks better than the site of a real Brunswick boutique that has been trading for a decade. They can generate the product shots. They can generate the reviews. They can generate an About page with a founder story and a photo of a person who does not exist.

The consequence for legitimate businesses is not obvious at first, and it is not really about scams. It is that your website’s appearance has quietly stopped doing a job it used to do for you. Looking good still matters for whether people enjoy using your site and whether they buy. It just no longer answers the question “is this real”, because the fakes clear that bar now too.

Real businesses are already wearing the cost of this. The reporting notes genuine boutiques being impersonated and having to sort out confused customers who thought they had bought from them.

The regulator wrote your to-do list

Here is the useful part, and I do not think many businesses will spot it.

Alongside the warning, the ACCC published advice for consumers on how to tell a real business from a fake one. Verify the business independently. Look for genuine contact details. Check independent reviews. Search the business name alongside the word “scam”. Look the business up on the Australian Business Register.

That is written as consumer advice. Read it from the other side and it is a checklist of things your business needs to make easy. Your customers are being told, by the regulator, to run these checks. The only question is whether you pass them.

So go and run them on yourself.

Genuine contact details. A real street address, a phone number a human answers, and a business email rather than a Gmail address. If your contact page is a form and nothing else, you look exactly like the fakes do.

Findable on the Australian Business Register. The ACCC is telling people to check the ABR, which means your ABN is now a trust signal rather than an invoice formality. Put it in your footer. Make sure the name on the register matches the name you trade under, because a mismatch is precisely what a suspicious customer will find.

Independent reviews that resolve to real profiles. Reviews on your own site prove nothing now, because those are trivially generated. Reviews on your Google listing, attached to accounts with histories, are much harder to fake. We have written before about reviews being the cheapest marketing you are not doing, and this is a second reason to bother.

A consistent identity everywhere. Same business name, same address, same phone across your website, your Google Business Profile, and the directories you appear in. Fakes are almost never consistent across sources, because consistency takes years of ordinary trading. Yours is free evidence, if you tidy it up.

Search your own name plus “scam”. Genuinely, do this today. You want to know what your customers find, and you especially want to know if someone is already impersonating you.

The same work makes AI describe you correctly

There is a neat two-for-one here that makes this easier to justify.

Everything above is structured, machine-readable information about who you are: a verifiable identity in your schema markup, a consistent name and address across sources, real reviews with real provenance. That is the same groundwork that determines whether an AI answer engine describes your business accurately when someone asks it for a recommendation, which we covered in why your business is invisible in AI search.

One body of work, two payoffs. It proves you are real to a cautious human, and it makes you legible to the software that increasingly answers on their behalf. Neither of those is a design job.

The uncomfortable bit, from a web company

We build websites, so there is an obvious temptation to skip this next part.

A beautiful website is no longer a differentiator. It is table stakes, and the bar has been dropped to the floor by tools anyone can use. That does not make design worthless, good design still decides whether people understand your offer and whether they buy. But if your entire case for being trusted rests on looking the part, you are relying on something a stranger can now replicate in an afternoon.

The differentiator has moved to the things that are expensive to fake: a trading history, a verifiable identity, reviews from real people, a phone someone answers. Boring, unglamorous, and much harder to copy than a hero image.

The func.digital take

The genuinely new thing here is not that scammers exist. It is that the regulator has publicly told consumers to stop trusting appearances, which means the burden of proof has shifted onto legitimate businesses. You now have to actively demonstrate you are real, and most Melbourne websites we look at are not doing that, not because anyone decided against it but because it never used to be necessary.

None of the fixes are big. An ABN in the footer, contact details a human stands behind, consistent listings, real reviews, and structured data that says plainly who you are. An afternoon of work for most businesses.

If you want to know how your site looks to a cautious customer running the ACCC’s checks, that is part of a free digital systems audit. We will run them, tell you where you look thin, and fix the structured data while we are in there. Get in touch, and let’s make sure you can prove it.