Health and Wellness Advertising Restrictions on Google Ads: Keeping Your Campaigns Compliant

If Google Ads was solely a paid search service, using it for health and wellness marketing would be a less complicated proposition. Search itself is a high-intent channel in which the user willingly provides data (in the form of a query) in order to find more information about a topic. But when you layer in on-site tracking, personalized search results, and Google Ads’ expansive inference-based campaign offerings across other mediums like Google Shopping and YouTube, you suddenly have a lot of data being collected. 

That can create serious risk for health marketers. Patient privacy laws—namely, HIPAA—restrict what brands can legally do with user data, and that same data can create legal exposure for the ad platforms themselves if it ever reaches their systems. To limit that risk and protect user trust, digital marketing platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads enforce their own strict health advertising policies on top of existing legal restrictions.

And given how fast digital marketing is evolving in the AI era, these policies need to be updated constantly in order to keep up. Below are the health and wellness advertising rules that Google and Microsoft enforce as of 2026.

Health Policy Restrictions on Google Ads

Google Ads governs health advertising through two connected policies: Personalized Advertising, which dictates targeting and messaging, and Healthcare and Medicines, which informs certification, drug terms, and what health categories can run at all.

Personalized advertising and health targeting

Google’s Personalized Advertising policy is meant to prevent brands from advertising sensitive topics to users in ways that feel invasive. Its Health in Personalized Advertising section forbids advertisers from using ad personalization to deliver content related to:

• Products, services, or treatments intended to manage chronic health conditions
• Disabilities
• Physical or mental health conditions
• Health problems associated with intimate body parts or functions, including genital, bowel, or urinary health
• Invasive procedures, including cosmetic surgery

Though there are exceptions for healthcare professionals (more on that later), these rules also apply to targeting potential caretakers who may be responsible for someone with a covered health issue. Outside its health-specific section, the same policy also forbids advertising that:

• Highlights personal trauma or abuse
• Creates feelings of negativity through body shaming or suggested negative outcomes if a user doesn’t take a certain action

Both provisions matter for health providers specifically. A brand offering counseling services for past trauma, or a weight-management brand promising a healthier outcome, has to advertise those services without tripping either one.

Certifications and the Healthcare and Medicines policy

Google’s Healthcare and Medicines policy dictates what health and drug information can and can’t be advertised, and what certifications a brand needs to advertise certain products and services.

• Online pharmacies, telemedicine providers, and addiction treatment services need to apply for and receive LegitScript certification to advertise on the platform
• Insurers need to be certified with G2 to run Google Ads
• Only certified advertisers may target prescription drug keywords—enforcement got noticeably stricter in August 2025, when Google retired the internal “Restricted Medical Content” label it had used to manage certified advertisers, while keeping the underlying rule itself in place
• Non-egregious violations still draw a seven-day warning before suspension; egregious violations can mean immediate suspension with no warning at all

If your account touches compounded medications, hormone therapy, weight-loss drugs, or telehealth prescribing, it may be worth reading outside legal counsel covering this shift.

Healthcare professional (HCP) targeting

Google reintroduced limited targeting of healthcare professional audiences for eligible advertisers in 2025: 

• Health brands marketing to physicians, nurses, or other licensed providers can use Remarketing and Customer Match lists to reach them directly
• Consumer health targeting remains just as restricted as ever
• Advertisers promoting prescription drug products to HCPs still need a separate certification confirming compliance with state, federal, and self-regulatory standards
• Agencies managing those campaigns need formal authorization from the healthcare company itself

Clinical trial advertising, experimental treatments, and gene therapies

• Google forbids clinical trial recruitment ads in most countries, but the US, UK, and Canada are not among them
• Google forbids promotion of speculative or experimental medical treatments, as well as cell or gene therapies, with limited exceptions

Prescription drug terms

• Google limits advertising of prescription drugs in most countries, but not the US, Canada, and others, provided the advertiser has proper certification
• Businesses can use drug terms in their ads and landing pages without certification, but can’t bid on those terms without it
• Google maintains a list of monitored drug terms, along with a separate list of unapproved substances, most of which wouldn’t concern legitimate health providers

Google Shopping Ads

Google Shopping ads are some of the most potent digital marketing tools out there, but they’re naturally a complicated proposition in healthcare and wellness lanes. Some brands and products are eligible, some are not.

Eligible: physical, direct-to-consumer products

• Over-the-counter medications and supplements not on Google’s unapproved list
• CBD products in select markets with proper certification
• At-home diagnostic or lab test kits
• Medical or wellness devices sold directly to consumers

Not eligible: intangible or access-based services

• Consultations, therapy or counseling sessions, coaching, or care management programs
• Membership-style or enrollment-based access models
• Unapproved pharmaceuticals or anything else on Google’s prohibited healthcare list

Shopping ads for subscription healthcare products—like GLP-1 and erectile dysfunction meds—sit in an even grayer area. Google clarified in October 2025 that physical-goods subscriptions are allowed across categories including healthcare, prescription drugs excluded. Merchant Center still evaluates the whole picture: product data, landing page, and checkout all have to agree on what’s being sold and for how much, and a mismatch there can suppress every campaign in the account, not just one ad group.

Sexual health and wellness

Google also has distinct policies for advertising sexual health products on YouTube and the Display Network, covering everything from over-the-counter products like lubricants up to prescription medications. Sexual health products must be:

• Targeted only to users 18 years of age or older
• Not promoted based on themes of sexual pleasure or enhancement
• Not advertised in sexually suggestive ways
• Advertised in accordance with local and country-specific laws

The policy also includes rules against advertising certain products outside the United States and Canada.

Sensitive targeting in Demand Gen and Discovery Campaigns

Google clarified in June 2026 how its Restricted Targeting policy applies to Demand Gen and Discovery campaigns:

• Health conditions are a sensitive interest category
• Customer Match, your data segments, audience expansion, and lookalike segments are all restricted when a campaign promotes something in that category

This matters for any health advertiser shifting budget into Demand Gen, where audience signals do more of the work than they do in standard search campaigns.

Health Policy Restrictions on Microsoft Ads

Microsoft Ads is a smaller paid search platform than Google, but many health brands still use it to reach their audience—and like Google, it has its own detailed policy guidance for health advertisers. Microsoft’s health advertising page lays out specific restrictions for each country, and its policies are generally more restrictive than Google’s. For instance, while Google allows clinical trial recruitment ads in some countries, including the US, that’s entirely outlawed on Microsoft Ads. The language is broad elsewhere too: Microsoft’s policy states simply that “Ads related to sensitive health conditions targeting consumers are not allowed.”

Restricted content: pharmacy and healthcare products and services

• Pharmaceutical sellers need LegitScript certification, though Microsoft also accepts accreditation from the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy
• Advertisers running online pharmacy or prescription drug ads have to go through a pre-approval process before serving in any allowed market, a requirement added in January 2026
• Brands can’t advertise in ways that create the impression of direct health targeting, using language like “your condition” or “your symptoms”
• Claims and content for weight-loss products and services are heavily restricted
• GLP-1 manufacturers specifically have had to label their drugs as compounded since July 2025
• Prophylactic advertising is widely forbidden
• Drug and alcohol addiction recovery advertising has been allowed in the US with restrictions since August 2025
• Microsoft maintains its own list of disapproved healthcare products and supplements

Keeping Your Healthcare Paid Search Campaigns Compliant

Keeping up with Google and Microsoft’s health advertising policies is a daunting challenge on its own, especially with how often certification requirements, landing page rules, and approval standards shift. But compliance can never be an afterthought: the stakes are too high. Healthcare paid search campaigns need to be built for compliance from the ground up, from LegitScript certification to keyword and landing page alignment, rather than adapting traditional eCommerce PPC tactics until they happen to fit.

That’s exactly why healthcare brands choose to work with specialized agencies. OuterBox has a dedicated healthcare marketing department that has helped design compliant, successful paid search strategies for some of the biggest names in digital health, telehealth, primary care, insurance, and more. If your brand is looking to scale on Google and Microsoft Ads without risking ad disapprovals or worse, consider reaching out to our team today.