If your practice sells PRP or a stem cell procedure, Google's advertising policy names that treatment and says you cannot promote it. This is not a bidding problem or a landing page problem. It is a written rule, published and findable, and it is also very easy to go years without meeting it.
The conversation that sent me looking came from an owner who performs the whole procedure in house, start to finish, in one visit. It is the highest ticket item in the building and the reason the practice wanted to advertise at all. The working assumption was that the campaign covered it. I went and read the policy before answering, because being confidently wrong about this would cost somebody real money.
Here is what it actually says.
What the policy is called
Finding it is half the problem, because it is not filed under any word you would search for. It sits inside Google's Healthcare and medicines policy, and its full title is:
"Speculative and experimental medical treatment, cell therapies, and gene therapies"
Nothing in that title says regenerative. Nothing says injection, or joint, or orthopedic. If you went looking in Google Ads help for the name of your own procedure, you could reasonably conclude that no policy existed.
Two rules in one paragraph
The section does two separate things, and they are not the same severity.
It opens like this:
"Except as provided below in relation to the promotion of cell or gene therapies in the United States, the following is not allowed:"
Then two items. The first is "Promotion of speculative or experimental medical treatments," with biohacking, do it yourself genetic engineering products and gene therapy kits given as the examples. There is no exception path for that one at all.
The second is "Promotion of cell or gene therapies, subject to the exception below." This is the one that reaches ordinary practices, because of what Google lists underneath it as examples:
- Stem cell therapy
- Cellular (non-stem) therapy
- Gene therapy and similar forms of regenerative medicine
- Platelet rich plasma, also referred to as PRP therapies
PRP is on the list, spelled out, with the abbreviation supplied so there is no ambiguity about what is meant. That one line ends most of these conversations.
The US exception, and who it is for
There is an exception. The way it is worded matters a great deal more than the fact that it exists:
"In the United States, Google allows the promotion of FDA licensed or approved cell or gene therapies by entities that hold the relevant FDA license or approval to market that product."
Read the subject of that sentence. It is not practices that administer an approved therapy. It is entities that hold the license or approval to market the product. You also have to ask for it, rather than just qualify quietly: the policy says to contact Google if you would like to apply for such an exception.
The change log is blunter still about who is left outside. When Google added this exception in July 2022, the announcement said:
"Entities that do not have an FDA-issued license or approval will still be unable to promote cell therapies and gene therapies on Google Ads."
My reading, clearly labeled as mine rather than as Google's: a practice drawing and processing a patient's own blood or tissue on site is not an entity holding an FDA license to market a product. If you believe you do hold one, that document is exactly what to put in front of whoever manages your account, because the application path is real. If you do not hold one, the exception is not yours.
The other exception, and its catch
There is a second carve out, and this one is global rather than United States only:
"Google allows ads for cell or gene therapies that are exclusively educational or informational in nature, regardless of regulatory approval status."
Google's own examples are academic papers and tickets for medical conferences. Notice the word exclusively. An ad that explains what PRP is and then asks for the booking is not exclusively educational. It is an ad for a treatment with an explanation attached to it.
So the honest version of that exception is this. You may teach, as long as you are not selling in the same breath. Hold onto it, because it points directly at where this traffic has to come from instead.
What happens if you ignore it
This is not one of the categories Google treats as its most serious, which is worth knowing because it changes the risk picture. The same page says:
"Violations of this policy won't lead to immediate account suspension without prior warning. A warning will be issued at least 7 days prior to any suspension of your account."
Compare that with the unauthorized pharmacies section and the prescription opioid section of the same policy, which both state that violations are considered egregious.
So the realistic outcome is a disapproved ad, or a warning with a week on it. Not a dead account overnight. Which is exactly why this can sit unnoticed for a year. The ad quietly does not run, the budget flows to the rest of your service menu, and nothing arrives in anybody's inbox to say that the flagship procedure was never in the auction. A campaign can be well built, well managed and performing fine, and still never serve for this one thing.
Does any of this apply to veterinary
Straight answer: I do not know, and I am not going to pretend to.
I read the Healthcare and medicines policy and this subsection of it in full. Neither one mentions veterinary medicine, animals or pets anywhere. The policy is silent. It does not say human only, and it does not say animals are included.
What I would not do is treat silence as permission. The treatment names on that list are the same names a veterinary practice uses on its own website, and ad review works against the words in the ad and on the destination page. If you are a veterinary practice, ask Google directly through the account rather than reasoning it out, and get the answer in writing before you build a budget on it.
For dental, chiropractic and optometry there is no ambiguity to resolve. You are squarely inside a human healthcare policy.
Where the rule stops
This is the part that decides what you actually do next, so it is worth reading slowly.
This is an advertising policy. It governs what you are allowed to buy from Google. It does not govern what you are allowed to publish.
- A search ad for PRP
- Named in the policy
- Blocked
- A search ad for stem cell therapy
- Named in the policy
- Blocked
- An ad if you hold the approval
- Apply for the exception
- Allowed
- A purely educational ad
- Nothing sold in it
- Allowed
- Your own service page
- Not an ad
- Unaffected
- A post answering the real questions
- Not an ad
- Unaffected
- Your Business Profile services
- Not an ad
- Unaffected
- Organic ranking for the term
- Not an ad
- Unaffected
Every blocked row is a paid placement. Every unaffected row is something you own outright. The restriction lands on one of those two columns and leaves the other alone.
That is not a consolation prize. For this single service it is the whole route. Somebody considering an expensive and unfamiliar procedure behaves the way everybody behaves with an expensive and unfamiliar purchase: they read about it first. What it costs, how long it takes, whether it hurts, what the day looks like, whether they are even a candidate. Those searches resolve to pages, and for this category they have to, because the ad slot is closed by rule rather than by anybody's choice.
Worth noting too that this is not a search only restriction. The policy page states that Display and Video 360 users must comply with the same Google Ads policy, so it is not a matter of moving the same message to a different placement.
What I would actually do
- Put the policy name in front of whoever manages your ads. Not "are we allowed to advertise PRP", which invites a guess. Send the policy title and ask whether this account has ever had anything disapproved under it.
- Find out whether an ad for this service has ever served at all. Ask for impressions on the regenerative keywords or that ad group specifically, over a named date range, rather than account wide performance. A flat zero is itself the answer.
- Ask where that budget has been going instead. It is usually funding the rest of your services, which is the campaign doing its job rather than a fault. You simply want to know, and to decide whether you would have chosen it.
- If you genuinely hold an FDA license or approval for the product, apply for the exception. Most practices will not hold one. A few do, and for them the path exists and is worth the paperwork.
- Build the page you would have sent the ad traffic to anyway. One serious service page for the procedure, written for the person deciding, with a price range if you are willing to publish one and the structure of the visit if you are not.
- Answer the questions separately rather than cramming them into that one page. Cost, candidacy, pain, recovery and what happens on the day are five different searches and they want five different pages.
- List the procedure on your Google Business Profile as a service and keep it current. It costs nothing and it is a local surface rather than an ad.
- Ask whether the agency you already pay has done any of items five, six or seven. Check that before you buy anything from anybody, including me.
The part worth sitting with
Paid search has a hard limit here, and Google set it. No bid, no budget, no sharper copy and no different agency gets around a sentence that names your procedure and says no. That is not a failure of anybody's campaign management, and the limit would be identical at every shop in the country, because it is not ours to move.
What is a choice, and it is yours, is whether the highest value procedure in the building has one honest page explaining it to the person weighing it up, or whether it has spent two years waiting on an ad that policy was never going to let through.