UK Healthcare Advertising Rules: What Private Clinics Can Say Online

Your website is an advert, and the ASA treats it as one

The Advertising Standards Authority applies the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising (the CAP Code) to marketing claims on a business’s own website and social media, not only to paid ads. For a clinic that means service pages, landing pages, blog posts that sell a treatment, and social posts are all in scope.

Section 12 of the Code covers medicines, medical devices, health-related products and beauty treatments. The ASA describes it as applying a high level of scrutiny: very high levels of evidence for medicinal claims, suitable qualifications for anyone claiming to treat, and specific rules for medicines. Section 3 covers misleading advertising, substantiation, testimonials and comparisons.

For SEO, the consequence is simple. A page written to rank for a treatment is a claim about that treatment. I write the claim first, check it can be substantiated, and only then optimise it.

Substantiation: the evidence has to exist before the page does

The CAP Code requires marketers to hold documentary evidence for objective claims before publishing them. In health, the bar is high. Words that help a page rank, such as “effective”, “permanent”, “painless” or “best”, are exactly the words the ASA asks clinics to prove.

How I handle it on a UK site:

• Condition and treatment pages describe what the treatment is, who it may suit and what the evidence says, with a citation to guidance such as NICE where one exists. This is also what Google’s quality raters look for on Your Money or Your Life pages, so the compliant version and the ranking version are the same page.
• Superlatives (“leading”, “top”, “number one”) come out unless the clinic can show a basis for them. ASA guidance on cosmetic interventions specifically warns against unsubstantiated terms like “leading”.
• Outcome promises are replaced with ranges and conditions taken from the evidence.

Prescription-only medicines: the Botox problem

Prescription-only medicines cannot be advertised to the public. The ASA’s guidance on advertising Botox ties this to CAP rule 12.12 and the medicines regulations enforced by the MHRA. In practice the ASA treats all of these as promotion:

• Naming the product, or indirect terms and hashtags that stand in for it.
• Before-and-after photos of the treatment, even with no wording.
• Discounts, offers or giveaways that involve the medicine.
• Influencer or celebrity endorsement of any medicine.

The ASA does allow two narrow website uses: a factual mention as a possible outcome of a consultation, and a price list that is not on the homepage and is not promoted. That shapes the SEO architecture. For an aesthetics clinic I build pages around the consultation and the concern (for example lines and wrinkles), keep medicine references factual and deep in the site, and never target the product name as a keyword on a promotional page.

This is the most common reason I see aesthetics sites rank for a term they should not be targeting at all. Ranking for it is not a win if the page itself breaks the rules.

Cosmetic procedures: images, targeting and titles

ASA and CAP guidance on marketing surgical and non-surgical cosmetic procedures adds three rules that affect content directly:

1. Before-and-after images must show results a typical patient could achieve, not the best case, and must not be edited in a way that exaggerates them.
2. No targeting of under-18s for cosmetic interventions (CAP rule 12.25). This matters for social content and for paid amplification of organic posts.
3. Titles and qualifications such as “surgeon” and “cosmetic surgeon” must be accurate. The guidance also warns against unsupported comparative language.

On the SEO side I keep galleries on their own crawlable page with a clear note on what each case represents, and I never use gallery images as the social preview for a treatment page.

Doctors: GMC standards and the word “specialist”

Doctors are also bound by the GMC’s Good medical practice (2024), whose domain on trust and professionalism covers acting with honesty and integrity and communicating as a medical professional. For marketing, that means information about a doctor’s services has to be honest and must not exploit a patient’s vulnerability or lack of medical knowledge.

The word that causes most problems online is “specialist”. The GMC keeps a Specialist Register, and most NHS consultant posts require a doctor to be on it. So on a practitioner page I:

• state the doctor’s registration exactly as it appears on the GMC register, with their GMC number;
• link the profile to the register entry and include it in the Person schema as a sameAs reference, which helps search engines and AI answers confirm the doctor is who the page says;
• describe areas of interest as interests unless the doctor is on the Specialist Register for that specialty.

This is the credential evidence that also moves E-E-A-T. Verified, linkable credentials are the strongest trust signal a medical page can carry.

Reviews and testimonials after the DMCC Act

From April 2025, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 made fake reviews a banned practice. The CMA’s fake reviews guidance (CMA208) sets out what is now prohibited:

• Submitting or commissioning reviews that are not based on a genuine experience.
• Incentivised reviews where the incentive is not clearly disclosed.
• Publishing reviews in a misleading way, such as suppressing negative reviews or showing only the good ones.
• Buying or selling fake review services.

Businesses that publish reviews must also take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove fake ones. For a clinic’s website that means no hand-picked testimonial carousel presented as representative, and no review schema built from selected quotes. Self-serving review markup is not eligible for Google review snippets anyway, so it adds risk with no search benefit.

Review gating (asking only happy patients to post) is the grey-hat tactic I see most often in healthcare. I don’t use it, and when I find it in an audit I recommend switching to asking every patient, which is compliant and gives Google a more natural review profile.

CQC ratings on your website

CQC-registered providers must display their rating on their website. CQC’s guidance on displaying ratings online asks for it to be shown prominently, above the fold, with the service name, the date of the report and a link to the CQC profile. The CQC widget keeps it current automatically.

I treat the rating as both a legal requirement and a trust asset: the widget goes on the homepage and each location page, and the CQC profile URL goes into the organisation’s sameAs list in schema, so the rating and the entity are linked.

A compliance pass I run on every UK clinic site

This sits inside my medical content SEO work. For the same exercise in other countries, see my guides to what AHPRA lets you say in Australia and healthcare advertising rules in Canada, or the compliance hub for all of them.

If you want me to run this pass on your site, book a strategy call.