AHPRA-Compliant Google Ads

Google Ads does not behave that way. The platform rewrites headlines, generates new assets, pulls text off your landing page and inserts keywords into your copy, all in the name of performance. Every one of those outputs is advertising for a regulated health service, and every one of them is your responsibility under section 133.

That is the core problem with healthcare paid search. Not the ads you wrote. The ads the account wrote for you.

Everything in the ad unit counts

When AHPRA assesses an advertising complaint about a paid search campaign, the relevant material is not just the headline. Treat all of the following as advertising you are accountable for:

• Headlines and descriptions across every ad variant
• Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets and every other asset
• Images and video in Performance Max and Demand Gen
• Promotion assets, including the terms attached to any offer
• Any rating or review asset showing on the ad
• The landing page the ad sends people to
• Call extensions and the script used by whoever answers

Landing pages catch people out. An ad can be immaculate and still breach, because the page it points to promises a guaranteed outcome.

Where accounts actually breach

Automatically created assets

Google can generate additional headlines and descriptions by reading your landing page and existing copy. It is a performance feature and it is on by default in some campaign types.

It is also a machine writing claims about a regulated health service without reading section 133. A page that describes a treatment's typical results can produce a headline that promises them. Turn the feature off in healthcare accounts, or accept that you are approving copy you have never seen.

Dynamic keyword insertion

DKI drops the matched search term into your headline. If someone searches "best dentist near me" and your ad inserts it, you have just published a superlative claim you cannot substantiate.

Any query the account can match on becomes copy you have published. In healthcare, that is a reason to avoid DKI rather than a reason to tighten the keyword list.

Ratings and review assets

Seller ratings and review-style assets pull third-party feedback into your ad. Reviews sitting on a platform you do not control are treated differently from reviews you deliberately surface inside your own advertising, and pulling one into an ad is a decision you have made.

LHM's position is to switch these off across healthcare accounts. The performance lift is not worth arguing the point with a regulator. That is our conservative call rather than a published ruling, and a practice with legal advice to the contrary is free to take a different view.

Broad match and query drift

Broad match will find queries you never intended to serve on, including queries about conditions or procedures outside your scope. Serving an ad for a service you cannot competently provide is a misleading-conduct problem before it is a wasted-spend problem.

Search term reports need reviewing on a schedule in healthcare accounts, not when performance dips.

Promotions and offers

If an ad carries a discount, a free consultation or a new-patient rate, the terms and conditions need to be stated. Character limits make that awkward inside the ad unit, so the conditions belong on the landing page, visible without hunting, and reachable from the ad in one click.

Urgency copy

"Limited spots." "Book before Friday." "Only three appointments left this month."

Standard paid search practice, and a direct fit for the prohibition on encouraging unnecessary use of a regulated health service. Urgency in healthcare advertising should reflect a clinical reality or it should not be there.

Prescription medicines and platform policy

Two additional layers sit on top of AHPRA.

Therapeutic goods law restricts advertising prescription-only medicines to the public, which means certain treatments cannot be named in your ads at all. Cosmetic injectables and prescription weight management drugs are where practices most often trip.

Google runs its own healthcare and medicines policies, with different requirements by location. In Australia, online pharmacy ads must be verified through LegitScript's Healthcare Merchant Certification Program or meet state and territory registration requirements, and telemedicine has its own conditions. Google approving an ad tells you it passed Google's policy. It tells you nothing about section 133.

How we configure healthcare accounts

The compliance work happens in the build, not in a monthly review.

Automated asset generation is disabled. Rating and review assets stay off. Ad copy is written against section 133 in the first draft and checked before it enters the account. Landing pages are treated as part of the ad and reviewed with the same care. Search terms are reviewed regularly and negatives added. Offers carry their conditions, and where a client wants an offer we think is risky, we put that in writing and propose an alternative.

We also tell clients when a competitor is running something non-compliant, because the usual next question is "why can they say that and we can't."

Get your account looked at

If you are running ads now, we will go through the account and give you a written list of what we would change and why, covering both compliance and performance. It costs nothing and there is no obligation afterwards.

Request a Google Ads compliance audit

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