Why do my healthcare keywords and ads keep getting restricted in Google Ads?

I am a marketer, not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal advice. The medical board section describes rules set by your state and enforced against your license, so it belongs with counsel rather than with me.

Four separate systems, routinely confused

A practice launching search campaigns hits restrictions from four directions, and treating them as one problem is why they take weeks to clear.

The personalized advertising policy. Health is a sensitive interest category, and keywords naming conditions interact with it.

The content policy. Unrelated to health. A phone number in ad text is the one that catches practices.

Certification gates. Some healthcare verticals can’t run at all until a third party certifies the advertiser.

State medical board advertising rules. Not enforced by the platform, and the only one attached to your license.

Different causes, different remedies, different consequences.

Condition keywords, and what the restriction actually does

This is the one that gets described most inaccurately, including in the first draft of this page.

A campaign goes live and some keywords show a limited status against the personalized advertising rules. What that usually means on Search is Eligible (limited), and the important part is that the keyword still serves. It is a restriction on how the ad can be personalized, not a switch that turns your traffic off. A practice told its campaign is dead because half the keywords show a policy label has usually been told something wrong.

Google’s health policy lists remedies in order, and the first two are editing your targeting and editing your content. Appeal is on the list too, and a keyword-level exemption mechanism exists. On one account I launched, eleven of thirty exact-match keywords came back flagged under this policy and all eleven cleared. That’s one account’s experience rather than a rate you should plan around, and I’d treat the flag as a queue rather than a verdict.

What isn’t restricted is worth saying. On the accounts I’ve worked, bare condition names have been the cheapest and best-converting keyword family, and the waste sat in the informational modifiers around them rather than in the condition terms. So a policy label is not a reason to cut them.

Phone numbers in ad text

Putting the practice’s phone number in a headline or description is not allowed, and Google’s own example is “Call 1-800-123-4567” in a description.

There’s no exemption route for an ordinary practice number. The one documented exception is a business whose name is itself a phone number, which can request review, and there’s the standard appeal path that exists for everything. Neither helps a practice with a normal number in its copy.

This one wastes real time. I’ve seen a complete set of prepared ads, every headline and description written, where each variant carried the practice’s number in the copy. Every one would have been rejected at launch. The number belongs in a call asset, which is the feature built for it, renders as a tappable button, and reports its calls as their own conversion.

Google won’t policy-check a payload it can’t accept, so a validation pass can come back clean on a batch that would be rejected on submission. Screen your own copy for a phone-number pattern before you send it.

Certification, which stops some practices entirely

Worth knowing even if it doesn’t apply to you, because it’s the difference between a restriction and a wall.

Google requires certification before certain healthcare advertisers can run: LegitScript certification for addiction treatment and for telemedicine providers, pharmacy certification for prescription drugs, and a separate certification for health insurance. Without it the ads don’t serve at all, and no amount of keyword editing changes that.

A general medical or surgical practice advertising its own consultations does not need any of these. If you’re in one of the gated verticals, certification is step one and everything else on this page is step two.

The medical board, which Google will never mention

This is the one with real consequences, and the platform gives you no signal at all.

State medical boards set advertising rules for licensed practitioners. What they commonly do:

Restrict superlatives and comparative claims, with a substantiation test rather than a flat ban. California’s Business and Professions Code 651(b)(6) makes it unlawful to claim professional superiority “unless that claim is relevant to the service being performed and can be substantiated with objective scientific evidence.” So a substantiable claim can survive. An unsubstantiated “best hand surgeon in Dallas” is the problem.

Reserve board-certification language. California limits “board certified” to ABMS-member or ACGME-accredited boards or approved equivalents and requires the full board name. Texas rule 22 TAC 164.4 limits it to ABMS, AOA BOS or ABOMS and prohibits “board eligible” and “board qualified” outright. Note this is about the certification claim rather than the word “specialist” itself; California expressly permits a physician to state that they limit their practice to specific fields.

Constrain testimonials and before-and-after imagery.

An ad reading “the best hand surgeon in Dallas” will be approved by Google in minutes. In most states it’s the board that has a problem with it, unless the claim can be substantiated, and the complaint doesn’t arrive through the ad account.

Two things to do. Screen copy against a banned list before it’s written rather than after: superlatives, “#1”, “premier”, “guaranteed”, “safest”, “fastest”, and any outcome claim. And audit the assets that already exist, because they accumulate. Callouts, structured snippets, sitelinks and account-level assets written years ago by a previous agency are still serving, and an account can carry over a hundred flagged assets nobody has read since.

Do that pass with the physician rather than around them. They know what their board permits, and they’re the one whose license carries the risk.

What a clean launch looks like

Confirm whether your vertical needs certification. Screen copy for board language and phone numbers before anything is submitted. Submit the keyword set expecting some to carry a limited label, and read that label rather than reacting to it.

Then check the assets you inherited, because those serve alongside every new ad you write.

The account-level version of this pass is in the free Google Ads Setup Audit. It isn’t healthcare-specific, and the sections on assets, conversion actions and account hygiene apply to a practice unchanged. The compliance constraints underneath all of it are in whether a practice can use conversion tracking at all.