What a Testimonial and Results Disclaimer Actually Needs to Say ("Results Not Typical")

A weight-loss ad shows a customer who lost 80 pounds, with a small line underneath reading "results not typical." A course seller posts a screenshot of a student's six-figure launch, tagged "individual results will vary." Both of those disclaimers feel like they should work, and both of them, on their own, fail to satisfy the FTC's actual rule on testimonials. The agency has said for years that a bare disclaimer next to an atypical result doesn't cure the misleading impression the testimonial creates, and its 2023 revision of the Endorsement Guides tightened the surrounding obligations further, on fake and incentivized reviews, on who counts as liable, and on what "clear and conspicuous" means in practice. Here's what a testimonial and results disclaimer actually needs to say to hold up.

Why "results not typical" alone doesn't work

The FTC's Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials, codified at 16 CFR Part 255, treat a testimonial as an implied claim about what a typical customer can expect, even when the ad never says the word "typical." If you feature a customer testimonial describing an outcome, the ad is making a factual representation about results, and that representation has to be either accurate for the general case or accompanied by a disclosure of what the general case actually looks like.

The agency eliminated the old safe harbor, the idea that slapping "results not typical" under an eye-catching testimonial was enough, in its 2009 revision of the Guides, and the 2023 update built directly on top of that position rather than softening it. Under the current Guides, an advertiser has two compliant paths when it features a testimonial describing a result:

1. The result shown is what consumers can generally expect to achieve, in which case no separate disclosure is needed because the testimonial isn't atypical to begin with.
2. The result shown is not typical, in which case the ad must clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected performance in the depicted circumstances, stated in specific enough terms that a reader can compare the testimonial to it.

"Results not typical" satisfies neither path. It doesn't claim the result is typical, and it doesn't say what typical actually is. It just flags that a gap exists without closing it, which is precisely the sequence of events the FTC's own guidance walks through as a non-compliant example: a weight-loss testimonial claiming a 50-pound loss, disclaimed only with "results not typical," is still deceptive because the ad never tells the reader what an average user actually lost.

What changed with the 2023 revision

The FTC's June 2023 revision was the first full update to the Endorsement Guides since 2009, and it did not touch the "generally expected results" requirement above, that principle was already settled law by 2023. What it added was a set of obligations around how testimonials and reviews get created and displayed in the first place, several of which now apply directly to any business that collects or publishes customer feedback:

The revised Guides explicitly prohibit procuring, buying, or disseminating consumer reviews the business knows, or should know, are fake or don't reflect the honest opinion of a real customer, including reviews written by insiders (employees, their friends and family) without disclosing that relationship. They address review hijacking, taking reviews written for one product and displaying them against a different one. They cover incentivized reviews, requiring disclosure whenever a customer received something of value, a discount, free product, or payment, in exchange for a review, since research the FTC cited in its own rulemaking record shows incentivized reviews skew measurably more positive than unprompted ones. And they extend liability beyond the advertiser to the individual endorser and, in some circumstances, to the platform hosting the review, if that party knew or should have known the endorsement was deceptive.

None of that changes what a results disclaimer has to say. It changes what has to be true before you're allowed to publish the testimonial at all, and it raises the practical stakes of getting the disclosure language wrong, since the agency's Trade Regulation Rule on fake reviews, finalized separately in 2024, now carries civil penalties per violation on top of the Endorsement Guides exposure.

What the disclosure actually has to state

A results disclosure that clears the "generally expected performance" bar needs three specific pieces of information, not a single reassuring sentence:

The typical or average result, stated as a real number, range, or percentage rather than a vague qualifier. "Individual results may vary" states a fact everyone already assumes; it doesn't answer the question a reader actually has, which is what the average customer got. A disclosure that says "in a survey of 500 customers over six months, the average weight loss was 12 pounds" answers it.

The basis for that number, meaning where it came from: an internal customer survey, a clinical study, aggregated purchase and outcome data. A number without a source reads as invented, and if it's ever challenged, an advertiser needs to be able to produce the underlying data the disclosure claims to summarize. This is also where the timeframe matters. A result achieved over eighteen months reads very differently from the same result achieved in six weeks, so the disclosure needs to state the period the average was measured over, not just the outcome.

Whether the featured testimonial is representative of that average or sits meaningfully above it. If the person in your ad lost three times the average, the disclosure needs to make that gap legible rather than let the dramatic number stand alone with a footnote.

The version on the right isn't longer because longer sounds more official. It's longer because it's actually answering the question "compared to what," which is the only question the FTC's rule is built to force an advertiser to answer.

Placement matters as much as wording

A correctly worded disclosure that sits in a footer, a separate terms page, or a hover tooltip usually still fails, because the Guides require the disclosure to be clear and conspicuous in the same context as the claim it qualifies. The FTC's guidance on this point, echoed in its broader ".com Disclosures" guidance for digital advertising, treats proximity and prominence as part of the legal standard, not a design nicety. A disclosure has to appear near the testimonial itself, in a font size and color a reader would actually notice without hunting for it, and it can't depend on a click, a scroll past unrelated content, or a hover state a mobile user will never trigger.

For a video ad or an influencer post, that means the disclosure needs to appear on screen for long enough to be read, or be spoken aloud, not just typed into a description field most viewers never open. For a landing page built around a single dramatic testimonial, it means the results disclosure sits directly under or beside that testimonial, not three scrolls down in a separate disclaimers section. A well-built disclosure page still needs a place to live on the site generally, our Disclaimer Generator covers that broader page, but the results-specific disclosure discussed here also has to be repeated at the point of the claim itself, since a single link at the bottom of the homepage doesn't satisfy the proximity requirement for a testimonial featured on a landing page or in an ad.

A practical checklist before a testimonial goes live

Before publishing any testimonial that describes a measurable outcome, confirm four things: that the testimonial reflects the honest, current opinion of a real customer rather than an edited or outdated one; that any material connection between the business and the endorser, free product, payment, discount, employment, is disclosed alongside the testimonial itself; that the ad either shows a genuinely typical result or discloses the actual generally expected result with a real number and its source; and that the disclosure sits next to the claim, not buried in a separate terms page a reader has no reason to open. Businesses running influencer or affiliate-driven testimonials specifically carry an added layer of exposure here, our recent look at missing-disclosure lawsuits covers what several major brands paid out in 2025 for skipping the material-connection piece of this same framework, and the same disclosure discipline applies whether the testimonial came from a paid influencer or an ordinary customer review.

A site that collects and displays customer reviews more broadly, not just curated testimonials in ads, also needs disclaimer language that separates the platform's own claims from what individual reviewers say in their own words. That's a related but distinct problem from the results-disclosure language covered here, and it's worth reading alongside our guide to disclaimers for user-generated content if your site runs an open review or comment section rather than a curated set of ad testimonials.

The information in this article is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice on any matter, and does not create a lawyer-client relationship.