DHEA, ephedra, and hCG are called out by name in Google's ad policy. Here's how each restriction actually works and what it means for campaign structure.
Most compliance guides for peptide brands focus on the big, obvious flashpoint — therapeutic claims. Fewer talk about the specific named ingredients Google's Unapproved Substances policy calls out by name: ephedra, hCG, and DHEA. These three show up less often in day-to-day compliance conversations, but they're written into the policy explicitly, which means they get flagged on ingredient alone — no claims language required.
If your catalog touches any of these, or a formulation adjacent to them, this is the detail that gets missed until an account is already suspended.
Google's policy restricts "products that contain ephedra" as its own standalone line item, separate from the general unapproved pharmaceuticals list. There's no geographic carve-out published for ephedra the way there is for DHEA. In practice, this means any product containing ephedra or ephedra extract is treated as categorically restricted for Google Ads promotion, regardless of how it's marketed or where it's targeted.
For peptide and supplement brands, the practical implication is upstream of ad copy: if a formulation includes ephedra as an ingredient, no amount of research-use framing or compliant landing page copy resolves the restriction. The fix has to happen at the product formulation or catalog level — either the SKU is excluded from paid promotion entirely, or it's reformulated.
Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) gets a more nuanced restriction than ephedra. The policy specifically targets hCG "in relation to weight loss or weight control, or when promoted in conjunction with anabolic steroids." That framing matters — it's not a blanket ban on the compound itself, it's a ban on specific use-case positioning.
This is a common trap for peptide brands that also carry hCG-adjacent products in a broader catalog. A product page or ad that mentions hCG alongside weight-management language, or that appears in the same campaign structure as anabolic-steroid-adjacent products, can trigger this restriction even if the individual ad copy never uses a banned phrase. Google's review process looks at co-promotion patterns, not just isolated ad text — a lesson that applies broadly to how landing page copy needs to hold up across the whole funnel, not just the ad itself.
Practical fix: if hCG-adjacent products exist in the same catalog as your peptide line, keep them in entirely separate campaigns, ad groups, and — ideally — separate landing pages, with no cross-linking or bundled offers that imply a weight-loss or performance-stacking use case.
DHEA (Dehydroepiandrosterone) is the only one of the three with an explicit geographic exception: the policy restricts DHEA products "except in campaigns targeting the United States." This reflects DHEA's regulatory status as an over-the-counter dietary supplement in the US, while it remains a prescription-only or restricted substance in most other major markets, including the UK, EU, and Australia.
For brands running international campaigns, this is a geo-targeting decision, not a copy decision. A DHEA-containing product can run compliant Google Ads campaigns targeted at US audiences, but the same campaign structure needs to explicitly exclude non-US geos, or be split into a separate, narrower US-only campaign. Running a single global campaign that happens to include DHEA products is one of the more common self-inflicted policy violations we see in account audits — not because the brand did anything deceptive, but because the account structure didn't account for a country-specific exception baked into the policy itself.
Compliance conversations in this industry tend to center on the parts of the policy that require judgment calls — is this claim too strong, does this landing page copy cross a line. Ephedra, hCG, and DHEA restrictions require no judgment call at all; they're ingredient-level and, in DHEA's case, geography-level rules. That makes them easy to miss during a copy review, because the reviewer is trained to look for aggressive claims language, not to cross-reference the product formulation sheet against a specific named-ingredient list.
The fix is procedural: build ingredient screening into the same pre-launch checklist used for claims review, not as an afterthought. Any new SKU or formulation update should be checked against this specific list before a campaign goes live, the same way it would be checked for therapeutic language.
Google's policy doesn't publish a threshold, and in practice ad review systems don't distinguish between trace and primary-ingredient concentrations. Treat any labeled ephedra content as fully restricted rather than assuming a low dose is exempt.
Yes, when the positioning avoids weight-loss, weight-control, or anabolic-steroid-adjacent framing entirely. Fertility- or research-context positioning, kept separate from any performance or weight-management messaging, sits outside the specific restriction named in the policy.
No — the restriction is about ad targeting, not product availability. A brand can sell DHEA products worldwide while running Google Ads campaigns geo-targeted exclusively to the US for that specific product line.
Before a campaign is built, at the same stage as claims and landing page compliance review — ideally as a fixed checklist item whenever a new SKU is added to the catalog or an existing formulation changes.
See how a compliance-first account rebuild handled a mixed catalog without losing scale.
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