If you work in healthcare or health tech marketing, you have probably had this moment: campaigns are built, budgets are approved, leadership is excited, and then everything grinds to a halt with “Disapproved: Healthcare and medicines policy.” Your ads stop serving, performance reports flatten out, and suddenly you are spending your day deciphering policy language instead of optimizing spend. Not exactly how you planned to use your time.
It is more than an annoyance. It can derail launches, patient acquisition pushes, or carefully sequenced GTM plans. The upside is that in most cases, there is a way forward. You just need to pinpoint what, exactly, Google is objecting to.
Google does not have a personal grudge against healthcare brands, but it does treat anything remotely health-related as sensitive. Automated systems crawl your ad text, landing pages, and targeting to decide whether you are crossing a line, often in ways that feel overly cautious for what you are actually promoting.
Frequent triggers include:
Recent policy updates have tightened enforcement even further, so disapprovals are becoming more common, not less.
Before you rewrite everything in sight, pause and read the exact policy attached to the disapproval. In the ad platform, hover over the status and look for the label. Things like “Restricted medical content,” “Health in personalized advertising,” or “Misleading health claims” matter more than the generic warning.
Then zoom out and check whether the issue is tied to the ad itself or something at the campaign level, like locations, audiences, or extensions. This quick diagnosis can save you from gutting perfectly fine messaging when the real problem is a remarketing audience or a single setting choice.
Most blocked healthcare ads fall into a handful of patterns:
Virtual care, clinics, behavioral health, weight management, addiction services, and similar offerings. These categories are tightly controlled, especially around retargeting, outcome claims, and how you talk about conditions.
If your keywords or copy reference prescription products, GLP-1s, or similar therapies, you are likely in a highly regulated lane that requires extra approvals.
You might be selling workflow tools to providers, but if your landing page is full of patient outcomes, conditions, or clinical language, automated systems may still treat you like a direct-to-patient healthcare advertiser.
Each category has its own rules of engagement, so you need to know which one you are in before you start “fixing” things.
Once you know your lane, you can adjust copy with purpose instead of watering everything down.
The goal is to stay truthful and clear while removing obvious policy red flags, not to make your ads sound like legal disclaimers.
Some healthcare verticals simply will not scale in paid search without proper certification from third parties or Google’s own programs. Examples include:
If you operate in one of these spaces and keep trying to work around the requirements, you will fight recurring disapprovals and inconsistent delivery. Sometimes the only real solution is to go through the formal approval path, even if it is not the fastest option.
There are plenty of cases where your ad is compliant and still gets swept up by automated filters, especially for B2B or general wellness content. When that happens, file an appeal and be specific. Spell out who your audience is, what you offer, and why the cited policy does not fit your use case.
If the first appeal fails but you are confident you align with policy, escalate. That might mean requesting a more detailed review through support or looping in a platform rep, if you have one, to help clarify how your business should be classified.
The clearer you are about being B2B or non-diagnostic, the easier it becomes to build a history of approved campaigns.
Even the cleanest copy can be blocked if your targeting suggests health-based personalization. For many healthcare-related advertisers, trouble shows up with:
If you keep seeing “Health in personalized advertising” flags, consider shifting toward:
It is not always as performance-friendly as hyper-granular retargeting, but it is significantly more sustainable.
Instead of treating every disapproval as a fire drill, turn what you learn into a reusable framework:
That shift, from reactive troubleshooting to proactive design, makes your campaigns more resilient and saves a lot of time and stress.
When that dreaded disapproval hits, it is tempting to rewrite everything and hope for the best. A better move is to treat it like a diagnostic signal and ask which lever is causing the problem. Is it copy, landing pages, targeting, or missing certifications?
Once you answer that, fixing it becomes a lot less painful and a lot more predictable.