Doctors can run Google Ads in Australia. The campaign has to pass two separate rulebooks, and passing one tells you nothing about the other. Google checks its own advertising policy. AHPRA enforces Section 133 of the National Law, where the maximum penalty is $60,000 for a person and $120,000 for a company. Google's approval is not a compliance check. Worse, Section 133(2) says a business that merely prints or publishes an ad for somebody else does not commit the offence. So Google is protected by the same section that exposes you.
Can doctors run Google Ads in Australia?
Yes. Paid search is not banned for registered health practitioners.
It is also the channel where clinics get into trouble fastest. Not because the rules are harder in paid search. Because the format is short.
A headline gives you 30 characters. There is no room for a qualifier. There is no room for the sentence that would have made the claim defensible. So the copywriter cuts the caveat and keeps the promise, and the promise is the part Section 133 cares about.
Your website has space to be careful. Your ad does not.
Why does Google approving your ad not make it compliant?
Because Google is checking a different document.
Google reviews your ad against the Google Ads policies. Those are commercial rules written by a private company for a global platform. They are real, they are enforced, and an ad that breaks them gets disapproved.
AHPRA enforces Section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law. That is an Australian statute with a criminal penalty attached.
The two tests overlap in places. They are not the same test. An ad can sail through Google review and still breach Section 133 on the day it goes live.
| The question | Google's policy | Section 133 |
|---|---|---|
| Who wrote the rule. | Google, as a private platform. | Australian Parliaments, as law. |
| What happens if you fail. | The ad is disapproved or the account is suspended. | Prosecution, with a maximum penalty of $60,000 for a person and $120,000 for a company. |
| Can you use a patient review. | Generally yes, and Google has ad formats built to show ratings. | No. Testimonials about the service or business are banned outright. |
| Can you say you are the best in the area. | Google asks for substantiation of superlatives. | Treated as misleading unless you can prove it, which almost nobody can. |
| Who gets penalised | The account holder | The person advertising the service. Section 133(2) excuses the publisher. |
Read the last row again. Section 133(2) says a person does not commit the offence merely because, as part of their business, they print or publish an advertisement for another person. Google publishes your ad as part of its business. You wrote it.
What does Google itself ban for ads targeting Australia?
Google's Healthcare and medicines policy carries country-specific rules, and Australia has its own set. Three of them catch clinics.
Prescription drug terms. Google states that ads targeting Australia cannot use prescription drug terms in the ad or its destination. Read the second half of that. The destination is your landing page. So a compliant headline pointing at a page that names the drug still fails.
Certification for telehealth and online pharmacy. Google restricts the promotion of services related to online prescribing, dispensing and the sale of prescription drugs. Advertisers must be certified by Google to run those ads, and in Australia that runs through LegitScript's Healthcare Merchant Certification Program.
Addiction services. In Australia, Google allows the promotion of recovery-oriented drug and alcohol addiction services by government entities only. A private clinic cannot advertise them on Google here at all.
One thing to watch, because it will be misread. In April 2026 Google updated the policy to let certified telemedicine providers promote prescription drug services. That change was for New Zealand. It did not extend to Australia.
Google's policy pages are the operative document and they change on their own schedule. Check the country specifics before you build a campaign, not after it is disapproved.
What does Section 133 ban, word for word?
The section is short. It is worth reading in full once, because every paid search mistake lands in one of these five limbs.
A person must not advertise a regulated health service, or a business that provides one, in a way that:
- is false, misleading or deceptive, or is likely to be misleading or deceptive.
- offers a gift, discount or other inducement to attract a person to use the service or business, unless the advertisement also states the terms and conditions of the offer.
- uses testimonials or purported testimonials about the service or business.
- creates an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment.
- directly or indirectly encourages the indiscriminate or unnecessary use of regulated health services.
The maximum penalty sits directly under it. For an individual, $60,000. For a body corporate, $120,000. Those are per offence.
Those figures are current. They are also the reason a lot of the advice online is wrong. A 2022 amendment lifted them from $5,000 and $10,000, and as of July 2024 the higher amounts apply in every state and territory. Plenty of guidance still quotes the old numbers, which understates the exposure by a factor of twelve.
Source: Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (Queensland), Section 133, current as at 10 April 2026, read against AHPRA's statement of the pre-2022 maximums. Bars are drawn to scale against the $120,000 maximum. These are maximums per offence, not typical outcomes.
Which parts of a Google Ads account can breach Section 133?
More of it than most practices expect. Section 133 covers the advertising, and a Google ad is assembled from several pieces that different people control.
| Part of the account | Why it can breach |
|---|---|
| Headlines and descriptions | Where outcome promises live. Thirty characters is not enough room for the caveat that would have saved the claim. |
| Sitelinks and callouts | Short by design, often written once and never reviewed, and they show alongside the ad as part of it. |
| Rating and review extensions. | Star ratings and pulled review text are testimonial material. Section 133(1)(c) bans testimonials about the service. |
| Promotion extensions | A discount without its terms and conditions is exactly what limb (b) describes. |
| Automatically created assets | Google can generate headlines from your landing page. If the page overclaims, the ad inherits it and nobody signed it off. |
| The landing page | Google's Australian rule already reaches the destination. Section 133 reaches your whole site. |
The last two are the ones that catch careful practices. You can write five compliant headlines and still have a sixth generated for you.
Our read on rating extensions is that they are the sharpest risk in the list, because they are a setting rather than a sentence. Nobody writes them, so nobody reviews them. That is analysis, not a published AHPRA ruling. The safe course is to treat any star rating you switch on as something you chose and placed, which is the practical test for a testimonial. There is more on where that line sits in our piece on what counts as a testimonial under AHPRA.
What should the ad copy say instead?
The fix is almost always the same. Replace the promise about the outcome with a fact about the service.
| Do not run this | Run this | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Brisbane's best GP clinic. | GP clinic in Brisbane CBD, bulk billing for concession card holders. | A superlative you cannot prove reads as misleading. A billing fact is checkable, and naming who qualifies stops it becoming a promise to everyone. |
| Rated 4.9 by our patients. | Open 7 days, appointments from 7am. | A rating is testimonial material. Opening hours are not. |
| Pain gone in one session. | Assessment and treatment plan on your first visit. | An outcome promise creates an unreasonable expectation. A description of the visit does not. |
| Free skin check, book now. | Skin check, no gap for eligible patients. Conditions apply, see the page. | An inducement is allowed only when the terms travel with the offer. |
| Ask us about [drug brand name]. | Talk to a doctor about your treatment options. | Prescription drug terms are barred from both the ad and its destination in Australia. |
None of the compliant versions are weaker. They are more specific, and specific is what actually converts a search. We made that case at length in why compliant copy is not boring.
Who is liable if an agency built the account?
You can both be. Section 133 says a person must not advertise a regulated health service in the banned ways. It does not limit that to registered practitioners, so it reaches the practice, the company that owns it, and the agency writing the copy.
What it does not reach is the platform. Subsection (2) is explicit. A person does not commit the offence merely because, as part of their business, they print or publish an advertisement for another person. That is the publisher's protection, and Google sits squarely inside it.
So the account being managed by somebody else does not move the risk off you. If you want to test whether your agency understands any of this, we wrote the five-minute version in how to tell your agency does not understand AHPRA. If a complaint has already landed, the process is set out in what happens when someone reports your clinic's advertising.
What should a practice check this week?
Six things, and they take about an hour.
- Export every active headline, description, sitelink and callout, and read them as one list. Most practices have never seen them together.
- Turn off automatically created assets until somebody has read what they produce.
- Check whether rating or review extensions are switched on.
- Open every landing page the ads point at and check it against the same five limbs.
- Search your own ad copy and destination pages for prescription drug names.
- Put the terms and conditions on the same page as any offer, not one click away.
If your clinic is also trying to show up in the unpaid results and in AI answers, the rules do not change but the tactics do. Start with SEO for doctors and the AHPRA advertising guidelines in 2026.
Paid search is the most forgiving channel to fix. You can change every ad in an afternoon. The website takes longer, which is why it is usually the part that has been wrong for years.
