Can You Advertise Mental Health Services on Google?

What this means for you

• Talk therapy, counseling and in-person psychiatry practices can advertise on Google Search without a healthcare certification.
• Health is a sensitive interest category. You cannot use customer match, remarketing lists, lookalikes or custom segments, and nobody under 18 sees personalized ads.
• Telehealth that prescribes medication online is a prescription drug service under Google's policy. It needs LegitScript Healthcare Merchant Certification and Google certification.
• Recovery-oriented drug and alcohol addiction treatment needs LegitScript addiction services certification plus Google certification in the US.
• No personal information goes into Google tags, data segments or audience lists.

MedScale Health, a paid acquisition agency for telehealth brands and clinics, runs Google campaigns for therapy, psychiatry and behavioral health practices. This page maps the Google policies that apply to mental health services, model by model, and what each means for targeting and tracking. This page is marketing guidance, not medical or legal advice. Platform policies change, so check the sources listed at the end before acting on a specific rule.

Therapy and counseling: open, with audience limits

Google's Healthcare and Medicines policy restricts specific things: prescription drug services, prescription drug terms, unapproved substances, addiction services and a handful of other categories. Therapy and counseling services are not among them, so a practice can run search ads on care-seeking queries without a certification. The constraint comes from a different policy.

Google's personalized advertising policy treats health as a sensitive interest category, and its examples include counseling services for mental health issues like depression, anxiety and addiction. Advertisers promoting in a sensitive category cannot use advertiser-curated audiences. That covers customer match, your data segments (what used to be called remarketing), lookalike segments and custom segments. Predefined Google audiences, such as in-market and affinity segments, remain available because Google excludes sensitive signals from them. Users under 18 are not eligible for personalized ads of any kind.

Telepsychiatry and medication management

Google restricts the promotion of services related to the online prescribing, dispensing and sale of prescription drugs, and names telemedicine providers among the businesses covered. In the United States, telemedicine providers must be accredited through LegitScript's Healthcare Merchant Certification Program and certified by Google before those ads serve. Google says it errs on the side of caution with landing pages that appear to facilitate online prescribing, so a page offering online evaluations with medication management is likely to be read as in scope even if the ad only mentions therapy.

Medication names follow Google's restricted drug terms policy. In the United States, advertisers can use prescription drug terms in ads and landing pages without certification but need certification to keyword-target them, and telemedicine providers need certification regardless. Prescription medications are also their own sensitive category for personalized ads. For controlled medications, remote prescribing without an in-person visit relies on DEA flexibilities that the fourth extension (Federal Register document 2025-24123) keeps in effect through December 31, 2026.

Addiction treatment

Google restricts the promotion of recovery-oriented drug and alcohol addiction services. Its examples include clinical addiction treatment providers, recovery support such as sober living, lead generators and referral agencies, and crisis hotlines. In the United States, advertisers must be certified as an addiction services provider through LegitScript and also certified by Google. Services unrelated to drug and alcohol addiction, such as impulse control disorders, behavioral addiction or nicotine addiction, are outside that policy, though they still count as health content for audience purposes.

Data: what never goes to Google

Google's personalized advertising policy bars advertisers from sharing personally identifiable information through data segment tags or product feeds, and from linking it to anonymous data. For a mental health practice the working rule is stricter: conversion events carry neutral names such as Lead or Schedule, never a diagnosis or a service line. MedScale tracks server-side under a BAA with neutral event names, and no names, emails, phone numbers, IP addresses or browser IDs go to any ad platform.

Ad copy that serves the category

• Describe the service and how to start: "Licensed therapists, online or in person. Book a first session this week."
• Name the conditions you treat as services, not as statements about the reader: "Anxiety and depression care" rather than "Feeling anxious?".
• Leave out outcome and cure claims.
• Point anyone in crisis to emergency services and crisis lines, never to a booking form.

What MedScale does

MedScale Health runs Google Search for mental health practices on care-seeking intent, with broad and predefined audiences only, landing pages that say who the service is for and how to start, and server-side tracking of booked first sessions. Where the model prescribes online or treats addiction, MedScale's LegitScript certification help runs the filing alongside the campaigns that can run now. Results are never guaranteed. Start with the free growth audit at medscale.health/audit.