What changed in October 2026
NMC’s Guidelines on Ethical Advertising and Public Communication by Hospitals/Medical Institutions and Registered Medical Practitioners are listed on its What’s New page, dated 6 October 2026. The Times of India summarised the main points:
- Doctors may not solicit, buy or publish fake, paid or misleading ratings, reviews or testimonials.
- Superlatives such as “best doctor”, “No.1 specialist”, “painless treatment” or “guaranteed cure” are barred.
- Discounts, freebies and limited-period offers used to attract patients are barred.
- Doctors posting on electronic media must disclose their name, qualifications, registration status and register number.
- Patient photographs must be cropped, blurred or blacked out.
Separately, NMC’s 2023 professional-conduct regulations remain in abeyance: an NMC amendment notification of 23 August 2023 adopted the Indian Medical Council regulations of 2002 as the code in force. Read the NMC document itself before you change your site.
Content assistants can quote, and the rules allow
- One page per treatment: what it treats, who it isn’t suitable for, the number of sessions, downtime, common side effects, who performs it, and the price or price range.
- One profile page per doctor: full name, qualifications, State Medical Council or National Medical Register number, languages, and which branch they consult at on which days. This also covers the disclosure the new guidelines expect, and it’s the information an assistant needs to say who you are.
- Plain answers to common questions: “Is laser hair removal permanent?”, “Can I get a chemical peel in summer?”. Answer honestly, with caveats, without outcome promises.
Three states, one search market: give each branch its own page
Delhi, Gurugram (Haryana) and Noida (Uttar Pradesh) are in three different states, but patients search across all of them. Give each branch its own page with its own address, PIN, phone number and hours, and its own structured data. A homepage that lists three addresses in one paragraph gets blended together. In our verified audits of skin, hair and cosmetic clinics, two of the seven homepages showed six or more different phone numbers, typically from a multi-branch footer.
Structured data: be more specific than “Organization”
Six of the seven clinic sites in our verified audits had no local-business structured data. Three of them had only a generic Organization or WebSite block of the kind SEO plugins add by default. For each branch, use MedicalClinic with medicalSpecialty set to Dermatology; a solo practice can use Physician. Include name, address, telephone and opening hours, and make every value match what’s visible on the page.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "MedicalClinic",
"name": "Example Skin Clinic, Golf Course Road",
"medicalSpecialty": "https://schema.org/Dermatology",
"telephone": "+91-124-XXX-XXXX",
"address": {"@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "Unit 4, Example Tower, Sector 54",
"addressLocality": "Gurugram", "addressRegion": "Haryana", "postalCode": "122002", "addressCountry": "IN"}
}Fictional example. Use your real branch details.
What to remove, and why it won’t cost you AI visibility
- “No.1 skin clinic in Delhi” banners and “painless” claims. Assistants can’t verify superlatives, and the guidelines bar them.
- Before-and-after galleries that show identifiable patients. Check the guideline’s requirements before you publish any patient image.
- Widgets or campaigns that pay for, or incentivise, reviews, and limited-period discount pop-ups.
Technical basics that still trip clinics up
- Exactly one H1 per page. Three of the seven clinic homepages we audited had more than one; one had 24 in the rendered page.
- A meta description of 70–160 characters. Six of seven were missing or outside that range.
- A page title of 30–60 characters that names the specialty and locality. Four of seven were outside that range.
- robots.txt allowing
OAI-SearchBot, which OpenAI says is needed to appear in ChatGPT search answers.
What we found in 7 verified skin, hair and cosmetic clinic audits
- 6 of 7 had no local-business structured data (3 had only generic Organization/WebSite markup)
- 6 of 7 had a meta description that was missing or outside 70–160 characters
- 4 of 7 had a page title outside 30–60 characters
- 3 of 7 had more than one H1 heading on the homepage
- 2 of 7 showed six or more different phone numbers on the homepage
- Of the 3 Delhi NCR sites: none had local-business structured data, and 1 didn’t name its city in the title or main heading
Source: MentionKaro by Digital Doctors audits of 7 skin, hair and cosmetic-surgery clinic websites (3 in Delhi NCR, 2 in Mumbai, 2 in Bengaluru), generated 17 Oct 2026 and independently re-checked against the live sites (all passed QA). A small sample, so read these as examples, not market statistics.
Your 15-minute self-check
- Treatment pages: indications, who it isn’t for, sessions, downtime, price or range
- Doctor pages: name, qualifications and register number
- One page and one
MedicalClinicJSON-LD block per branch (Delhi, Gurugram, Noida) - One phone number per branch, matching the page, the schema and Google Business Profile
- No superlatives, guarantees, paid reviews or discount pop-ups
- One H1; title 30–60 characters; meta description 70–160 characters
- robots.txt allows
OAI-SearchBot
Our free “Can ChatGPT read your website?” checker (coming soon) runs the machine-readable checks on this list.
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Questions
Can we still show our Google reviews on the site?
As reported, the guidelines target fake, paid or misleading reviews and testimonials that a doctor solicits or publishes. Whether embedding genuine third-party reviews is acceptable is a question for the NMC text and your adviser; don’t assume either way.
Do the same rules apply to our Gurugram and Noida branches?
NMC guidelines apply to registered medical practitioners across India. State rules on registering clinics differ between Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, so check the local requirements for each branch.
Do you have an office in Delhi?
No. We work remotely; an audit only needs your public website address.
Sources
- National Medical Commission: What’s New (6 Oct 2026 guidelines on ethical advertising)
- Times of India: NMC guidelines on doctor and hospital advertising (summary)
- NMC amendment of 23 Aug 2023 holding the 2023 regulations in abeyance (summary)
- schema.org: MedicalClinic
- OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
Rules and documentation change. This guide is general information, not legal advice. We don’t guarantee rankings, traffic or mentions by any AI assistant.