Healthcare Google Ads teardown: what 47 Indian advertisers promise

Data collected on 9 November 2026 by Gaurav Phogat. Method, coding rules and dataset are published below.

I reviewed the Google ads of 47 India-based healthcare advertisers in Google’s public Ads Transparency Center. Of the 45 whose ads I could read, 34 (76%) called themselves best, No.1, top or leading, 16 (36%) made an outcome or safety claim and 12 (27%) used a free or discounted offer. Fertility clinics pushed hardest on all three. Hospitals in the sample used no offers at all. Only 6 advertisers carried none of the five risk flags I tracked against the NMC’s October 2026 advertising guidelines.

This article is part of the healthcare digital growth series, best read in order from the pillar.

Last updated: 9 November 2026.

On 6 October 2026 the National Medical Commission notified its Guidelines on Ethical Advertising and Public Communication. They bar unverifiable superiority claims such as “best” and “No.1”, inducements that push people into unnecessary care, advertised success rates, patient testimonials and before and after photos. Search ads are where those words are most tempting, because every headline is competing for one click. So I wanted to see what Indian healthcare advertisers actually say in their Google ads, and how far that is from the new rules.

This is a digital and brand study. It looks at ad copy and creative, not at the quality of any clinic or doctor, and it is not legal advice. Every advertiser is anonymised.

Key findings

1. 76% used superlatives. 34 of 45 advertisers ran ads with “best”, “No.1”, “top”, “leading” or “most trusted” in headlines, image text or local ad names.
2. 36% made outcome or safety claims. 16 of 45 promised things like painless treatment, high or percentage success rates, a cure “from the root” or safe results.
3. 27% used inducement-style offers. 12 of 45 advertised free consultations, free tests, percentage discounts, money-back packages, low-cost or zero-interest EMI deals.
4. Fertility ads were the most aggressive. All 7 fertility and IVF advertisers used superlatives, 5 made success or outcome claims and 5 ran offers.
5. Hospitals avoided offers. None of the 10 hospitals used a free or discount offer, though 7 of them still used superlatives.
6. 87% carried at least one risk flag. 39 of 45 showed at least one of five NMC risk flags and 20 (44%) showed two or more.
7. Most accounts are small. The median advertiser had 15 ads shown in India. 17 of 47 had 10 or fewer, and only 3 had more than 100.

How I did this

Source. Google Ads Transparency Center (adstransparency.google.com), filtered to “Ads in India”, all topics, any time. It lists ads from verified advertisers with the creative as it was shown. I viewed public pages only, did not log in to any ad account and did not click any ad.

Why not live search results? My first plan was to search high-intent queries and record the ads. In the browser I used, four test queries such as IVF centre and knee replacement cost returned no text ads at all, so I did not build the study on live results pages.

Sample. I typed 20 healthcare terms into the Transparency Center’s advertiser search: hospital, IVF, fertility, dental, eye hospital, hair transplant, skin clinic, diagnostics, cancer, ortho, heart, ayurveda, physiotherapy, multispeciality, maternity, urology, homeopathy, children hospital, healthcare and laser. The suggestion lists returned 122 India-based advertiser entries. I kept verified advertisers based in India whose names clearly pointed to a patient-facing provider, and took up to three per term with the highest listed ad counts (five for hospital, four for eye and dental, to firm up those groups). Heart, healthcare and laser returned names I could not classify, so I dropped them. One ayurveda advertiser turned out to be a product brand and was excluded. That left 47 advertisers.

Coding. For each advertiser I recorded the India ad count shown, how many creatives loaded and how many were video. I then coded the first screen of creatives, roughly the first 8 to 14 previews, for ten features: superlative, free or discount offer, price, outcome or safety claim, patient testimonial, before and after image, experience or volume claim, doctor named, family or patient imagery and a phone number or call prompt. Two advertisers showed only video previews that did not render, so message results use n=45 and volume results use n=47.

Risk flags. Five features map to explicit restrictions in the NMC guidelines: superlatives, inducement offers, outcome or success claims, testimonials and before and after images. A flag means the ad would need review under the new rules. It is not a finding that anyone broke them.

Limits. The archive covers ads from any date, so many of these creatives were made before 6 October 2026. Hospitals are also governed by the Clinical Establishments Act or state law. Searching by name favours advertisers whose names contain a category word, so large chains with brand-only names are under-represented. Counts above 100 are approximate in Google’s display. One person coded everything on one day.

If you are working on this now, read it alongside Hospital Google Business Profile Study: What 216 Indian Listings Show and Local SEO vs Google Ads for clinics: where to spend first.

Best, No.1, top: the default headline

Three in four advertisers reached for a superlative. It shows up everywhere: in search headlines (“Best IVF Centre in” a named suburb), in display banners, and in the business name inside local ads, where a listing name like “Best Dental Clinic in” a locality is pulled straight into the ad. That last route is easy to miss, because nobody wrote it as ad copy.

Practical prompts were common and harmless. Almost half put a phone number or “call now” in the ad, and 38% named a doctor, usually with degrees. Those are factual and the guidelines allow factual information. The risky words sat next to them: “No.1 leading dentist”, “Best homeopathy doctor”, “Top rated physio clinic”.

Price transparency was rare. Only 2 of 45 showed an actual rupee figure, while 12 offered something free or discounted. The guidelines take the opposite view: factual disclosure of fees and packages is permitted, inducements are not.

Fertility ads push hardest, hospitals skip the offers

The split by category is sharp. Every fertility and IVF advertiser used a superlative. Five of seven claimed high or percentage success rates, and five ran an offer: a free first consultation, a percentage off an IVF package, a money-back package or EMI. Fertility is a long, emotional and expensive decision, and the ads lean on exactly that, with mother and baby imagery and “IVF failed?” hooks.

Hospitals behaved differently. None of the ten used a free or discount offer and only two made outcome claims (“painless”, “safe normal delivery”). They still used superlatives, often in location ads and sitelinks. Dental, skin and hair clinics sat in the middle, with “zero pain”, “pain free” and “natural results” as the common outcome lines. Two homeopathy and ayurveda clinics framed treatment as going “to the root”, and one promised cures for named skin conditions.

Most advertisers carry more than one risk flag

Counting the five flags per advertiser, only 6 of 45 were clean. Nineteen carried one flag, almost always a superlative. Thirteen carried two and seven carried three. The usual stack was superlative plus outcome claim, or superlative plus offer.

Testimonials and before and after images, the two items the guidelines are most direct about, were rare in Google ads: three advertisers used patient story videos and one used a before and after banner. That fits with what I saw on doctor Instagram accounts, where testimonials are far more common. Social is where patient stories live. Search ads lean on claims.

Small accounts, few videos, some odd set-ups

Most of these are small advertisers. The median had 15 ads shown in India, 17 had 10 or fewer, and only 3 crossed 100. Video was a minority format: 19 of 47 had no video among the creatives that loaded, and only 8 were mostly video. The video-heavy ones were mostly hospitals running doctor-led explainers on pregnancy and child care, or walkthroughs of their facilities. That is the safest content route under the new rules.

Three set-ups stood out. Two “multispeciality” ad accounts were promoting several unrelated doctors, in one case in a different city, which suggests an agency running ads under one verified identity. One diagnostics advertiser was a sample-collection partner bidding on a national lab brand’s name. And several clinics ran ads whose landing domain was their Google Business Profile rather than a website. None of these is necessarily wrong, but each makes it harder for a patient to know who is actually behind the ad, and the guidelines say third-party publication does not shift responsibility.

What this means for hospital marketers

These are digital and brand steps, not clinical or legal advice. The aim is to replace claims with checkable facts, which tends to keep ads approved under Google’s healthcare ad policy as well.

1. Audit every asset, not just headlines. Search sitelinks, callouts, image text, video thumbnails and the business name feeding location ads. Remove “best”, “No.1”, “top” and “leading” unless you can cite an independent, dated source.
2. Swap offers for fees. Publish the consultation fee or package price plainly instead of “free consultation” or “15% off”. Disclosure is allowed. Inducement is not.
3. Describe the process, not the result. Replace “painless”, “guaranteed” and success percentages with what happens at the visit, who sees the patient and how long it takes.
4. Keep patient stories out of ads. Put doctor-led education in video instead. It worked for the hospitals in this sample and it travels well on YouTube ads for hospitals.
5. Clean up the business profile name. If the listing name carries a superlative, every local ad inherits it. Use the registered name and the locality.
6. Put agency approvals in writing. If an agency runs ads under its own verified identity, make sure the hospital signs off the copy, because responsibility stays with the hospital.

Download the data

The full dataset (CSV) has one row per advertiser in shuffled order: an anonymised ID, the search term that surfaced it, advertiser type, India ad count as shown, creatives loaded, video creatives, a yes or no column for each of the ten coded features, short anonymised coder notes, and the collection date. It contains no advertiser names, doctor names, domains or cities. Collection date: 9 November 2026. The data is licensed under CC BY 4.0: you can reuse it with credit and a link to this page.

How to cite this study

Phogat, G. (2026). Healthcare Google Ads teardown: what 47 Indian advertisers promise. gauravphogat.com. https://gauravphogat.com/healthcare-google-ads-teardown-india/ Data collected 9 November 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

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