Why Are Your Google Ads Disapproved for Telehealth, and How Do You Fix It?

Why does Google reject telehealth ads?

Almost every telehealth disapproval on Google traces back to one of three causes, and each needs a different fix. MedScale works with telehealth brands and clinics, and the pattern holds across accounts: teams rewrite creative when the real problem is an account-level certification gap, then rewrite it again when the real problem is on the landing page.

• The advertiser is not certified to promote telemedicine services or prescription medication in the countries being targeted.
• The destination page carries claims, products, or language that Google's healthcare policies treat as unsupported or prohibited.
• The campaign promotes a substance or service that Google restricts regardless of who is advertising it.

Diagnosing which cause applies before touching the creative saves the most time, because only a restricted substance is a genuine dead end.

Is a Google telehealth disapproval a certification problem or a creative problem?

Google requires advertisers promoting telemedicine services and prescription medication to be certified before those ads can run, and certification is granted to the advertiser rather than to an individual ad. An uncertified account will see disapprovals across every campaign at once, which is the clearest diagnostic signal available.

If disapprovals arrived suddenly and affected everything simultaneously, the cause is almost never creative. It is an account status change, a policy update that expanded what requires certification, or a certification that lapsed. Rewriting ad copy in that situation produces new ads that fail in exactly the same way, which is why MedScale confirms certification status for every targeted country before any creative is rewritten.

In the United States, Google allows telemedicine providers that are accredited by LegitScript's Healthcare Merchant Certification Program and certified with Google. Its restricted drug terms rule changed on October 29, 2025: an advertiser no longer needs certification to name a prescription drug in ad text or on a landing page, but still needs it to keyword-target drug terms, and Google lists telemedicine providers among the businesses that must be certified regardless. For a telehealth brand the new rule changes little; for an in-person clinic it opens drug names in ad copy.

Approved ads that barely serve are a different problem. Google's Limited Ad Serving policy limits impressions until Google judges the advertiser qualified, and it does not disapprove individual ads.