Health content should be reviewed before publishing by a clinician whose scope covers the claims on the page, and again on a schedule and whenever guidance, services, or providers change. Record who reviewed it and when. AI-drafted content needs the same review plus a line-by-line fact check, because a language model does not know what your practice does.
Many practices route content through whoever has time: a marketing coordinator, an office manager, sometimes the owner late at night. That works for hours and parking. It does not work for a sentence about who is a candidate for a procedure.
This is a content-operations article for practice owners and marketing leads. It is not clinical guidance, and it does not describe how any search engine ranks a particular page.
Why does health content carry a higher review standard?
Google's helpful content guidance groups health with other "Your Money or Your Life" topics and says, of the qualities it looks for, "trust is most important." Its Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the instructions Google gives human evaluators, state: "For pages about clear YMYL topics, we have very high Page Quality rating standards." The same guidelines say "some types of YMYL information and advice must come from experts."
Those guidelines are not a ranking formula. They state that "No single rating can directly impact how a particular webpage, website, or result appears in Google Search." Read them as a description of what Google says good health content looks like, which matches what a careful practice would want anyway.
Marketing review and clinical review are different jobs
Two kinds of review get blurred together. Editing for clarity is not checking a clinical claim. A marketing editor can make a sentence shorter and kinder; only someone with the right clinical scope can say whether it is accurate for the patients this practice sees.
| Review | Who | What they check |
|---|---|---|
| Editorial | Marketing lead or editor | Clarity, reading level, voice, links, and spelling |
| Clinical | A clinician whose scope covers the topic | Accuracy of clinical statements, who the content describes, and the conditions and limits attached |
| Operational | Practice manager or billing lead | Scheduling, cost, access, and policy facts |
| Compliance | Privacy officer or counsel | Testimonials, images, authorizations, and advertising rules |
Not every page needs all four. A parking update needs operational review. A treatment page needs clinical and compliance review, for the reasons set out in treatment pages that do not promise outcomes.
Match the reviewer to the claim. A dentist can review a page about dental care but may not be the right reviewer for a sleep medicine statement on the same site, and a physical therapist may not be the right reviewer for a claim about imaging. When a page crosses specialties, it may need more than one clinical reviewer.
What does a dated review tell the reader?
On articles, a line naming the clinical reviewer and the review date tells a reader who checked the content and how recently. Google's helpful content guidance asks whether content presents information in a way that makes you want to trust it, with examples such as "evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it." A reviewer line linked to that clinician's bio supplies some of that background, and our guide to provider bio pages covers what the bio should hold.
Service pages can keep the review record internally rather than on the page. What matters is that the record exists: who reviewed which version, on what date, and what they changed. A date that is updated without a real review is worse than no date at all.
Make the review easy to do well. Send the clinician the claims that need checking, listed separately with the source for each one, rather than a finished page and a request to look it over. A focused list gets a more careful read than a long draft, and it leaves a record of exactly what was checked.
AI-drafted content needs a human fact check
Google's guidance on generative AI content is direct: "generative models don't retrieve facts, but predict a likely sequence of words based on their training data," and "It is critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing." For automatically generated content, it suggests publishers "consider adding information on how your content was created in a way that makes sense for your audience," and warns that using generative AI tools "to generate many pages without adding value for users" may violate its spam policies.
For a practice, the bigger risk is plausible content that is wrong for this practice. A model can write a fluent paragraph about what a first physical therapy visit involves, yet it cannot know what yours involves. The writer, human or AI, should not have to invent what the practice knows. Give the draft the practice's approved facts and voice, then review it as you would any other draft. Our article on AI content in your business's voice shows how to start from approved material.
Treat an AI draft's citations with the same care. A link in a draft is not evidence until someone has opened it and confirmed it says what the draft claims. In health content, a misattributed figure or a guideline that has since changed can mislead a reader and cost the practice credibility.
Update when guidance or the practice changes
Content goes out of date in two ways: the outside world changes, or the practice does. Set a scheduled review for every clinical page, and list the events that trigger an earlier one:
- A professional society, regulator, or public health agency changes its guidance on a topic the page covers.
- The practice adds, drops, or changes a service.
- A provider joins, leaves, or changes focus.
- A billing, scheduling, or access policy changes.
- A patient or staff member reports an error.
A review schedule only works if someone checks it. At a monthly meeting, the practice manager can ask of each clinical page: "When did a clinician last read this page, and what has changed since?" Pages without a good answer go on the review list. When a page needs more than an edit, deciding whether to update a page or create new content helps with the choice.
A fictional review log
Here is a hypothetical log entry for a fictional dermatology practice in Pennsylvania. It shows the record to keep, not any real practice's process.
- Page: the practice's overview of its acne care services.
- Draft source: approved practice notes and a recorded interview with the supervising dermatologist, with a first draft produced using AI assistance.
- Editorial review: marketing lead, March 3; tightened the opening and fixed two links.
- Clinical review: supervising dermatologist, March 6; removed a sentence implying a timeline for results and added a condition to the description of who is evaluated.
- Compliance review: not needed, since the page has no testimonials or images.
- Next scheduled review: September, or sooner if a trigger occurs.
The log is short. Its value is that anyone can see who stood behind each version of the page.
If the clinician and the marketing lead disagree about a sentence, record the disagreement and the decision. Clinical accuracy settles those disagreements, and the marketing lead's job is then to make the accurate version clear.
In Hudson South's process, Hudson Twenty-One records how the practice communicates across 21 dimensions so drafts sound like its clinicians, and AEO Creation turns approved inputs into answer-first content. Neither replaces the practice's own clinical review. For how this fits with the rest of a practice's pages, see how healthcare practices show up when patients ask AI.
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- Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-15.
- Search Quality Rater Guidelines (General Guidelines, September 11, 2025). Google. Read 2026-10-15.
- Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-15.