If you advertise prescription drugs, compounded GLP-1 (semaglutide, tirzepatide), telehealth, or anything else in regulated health, you have probably been told you need LegitScript.
Here is what it actually is, and where it stops.
LegitScript is a third-party certification body. It vets regulated businesses on behalf of major ad platforms and payment networks. Meta and Google check for an active certification before they authorise ads in restricted health categories. Without it, those ads do not run.
Healthcare certification
The programme most health and wellness advertisers need covers online pharmacies (prescription and OTC, including compounded GLP-1), telemedicine and telehealth (weight loss, HRT, mental health, primary care), medical spas running injectables or prescription-strength programmes, digital health platforms that connect patients with prescribers and partner pharmacies, manufacturers and relabelers, and adjacent categories such as veterinary, prescription eyewear, and pharmacy comparison sites.
GLP-1 has made this near-mandatory. Compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide are heavily scrutinised. Operating in that space without certification effectively shuts you out of compliant advertising.
Separate programmes exist for addiction treatment and for CBD, where platforms still permit those ads at all.
What certification actually gets you
Three things. Ad eligibility on Meta, Google, and the other major platforms. More stable card-not-present processing, because Visa and Mastercard recognise the same seal. And ongoing monitoring with a public mark, which is useful for partners and for catching issues before a platform does.
Inside Meta, a certified domain can be authorised to run prescription-drug ads. That is the door opening. It is not the account.
Running without it
Plenty of operators still try. Grey-market accounts with no credentials underneath. Quick launches that spend until Meta's classifier catches up. Copy and landing pages kept so vague they never trigger a restricted-category review.
Each of those has a short life. Grey accounts get terrible quality scores and die. Fast launches do not scale. Watered-down creative loses to certified GLP-1 brands running condition-specific ads on infrastructure that is allowed to say the thing.
One thing certification does not fix
LegitScript gets ads approved to run. It does not turn a standard Meta ad account into one built for regulated health, and it does not lift the Health & Wellness pixel restriction on its own. Eligibility and infrastructure are different layers. A certified brand on a cold account still sees holds, extra review, and more expensive traffic.
If you are advertising in regulated health seriously, certification is not optional. Workarounds buy time, not scale.
