What Your Website Pages Really Say (And Who Is Reading Them)
Many healthcare businesses don’t realize their website is read by two audiences. The first is current and prospective patients, who are there to learn what you offer. The second may be regulators and the legal teams of competitor companies. They may read the same pages with a very different purpose in mind. It is important to be mindful of the content on your website to ensure your marketing doesn’t create problems down the road.
Right now, websites that promote any type of GLP-1 medication are undergoing significant scrutiny. Interest in these products has risen and so has the attention paid to how they are marketed. The FDA has been reviewing telehealth and pharmacy websites more closely, the FTC has shown continued interest in the broader telehealth space, and brand manufacturers have shown they are willing to pursue marketing language that gets too close to their trademarks and their products. GLP-1s happen to be where this is playing out most visibly today, but the underlying rules apply to any page on a healthcare website, whether it discusses a weight management medication, hormone therapy, or a compounded medication.
This article walks through where liability lives on your site and gives you a starting point to review your own pages. It is not a substitute for a comprehensive legal review but may help you identify issues before someone else does.
The Language That Creates Risk
Certain kinds of marketing language draw more attention than others. The common thread is language that implies equivalence between two products that have not been evaluated the same way, or that borrows the reputation, data, or identity of one product to describe another.
One example is describing a compounded product as the “same as,” “identical to,” or “just like” a specific brand-name medication. Language like this suggests an equivalence that regulators have not evaluated and that competitors have a direct interest in disputing, since it implies their product’s tested safety and efficacy profile applies to something they had no role in producing.
This distinction matters because compounded medications are not the same as brand-name medications, and it affects how each is regulated. Brand-name medications go through FDA approval and are manufactured for mass distribution. Compounded medications, in contrast, are prepared for a specific patient based on a specific prescription, and compounding is regulated primarily at the state level rather than through the FDA approval process. Clinical data and safety statistics for a brand-name drug reflect that specific product as tested and approved through the FDA pathway. They do not automatically apply to a compounded medication, even one with the same active ingredient, which makes presenting them that way a common source of risk.
The language is only part of the picture.
Problems Beyond the Words
The text on a page is not the only thing that draws scrutiny. How a product is depicted visually can suggest a role or a regulatory status that a business does not actually have. This mismatch creates additional exposure to the business.
One example: a product photo showing a vial or package labeled with a telehealth platform’s own name, displayed on a page for compounded medication. That kind of image can imply the platform itself is functioning as the compounder. If that is not accurate, the gap between what the image suggests and what the company is actually licensed to do can become the basis for regulatory scrutiny.
Why Telehealth Platforms Seem to Draw Extra Scrutiny
Telehealth companies have drawn increased attention because they operate at the point of patient access. A telehealth platform is often the first stop for someone looking for access to a healthcare provider, a specific product, or related information. That visibility as a starting point for healthcare can be valuable, but the related marketing efforts may carry greater liability depending on how the services, products, or providers are described.
That said, being a smaller business does not provide cover. The tools available today, from automated monitoring to AI-assisted review, make it easy for regulators, manufacturers, and plaintiffs’ counsel to review websites at scale regardless of the size of the company behind them. A public, searchable website is available to all of them in the same way it is available to a prospective patient. Knowing you are being watched is one thing; knowing where to look is another.
Look Beyond the Obvious Pages
When a marketing-focused legal review is done, it typically starts with the product pages, especially on sites with a large number of offerings. But it is also important to look at other places.
One key area is blogs. They are often treated as lower risk internally, since the intent is informational rather than promotional. In practice, the same claims that would be flagged on a product page create the same liability when they appear in a blog post.
It is also worth extending the review to pages that are not designed as marketing at all, including the patient intake and checkout process. These are exactly the kinds of pages that can end up cited when a regulator documents the basis for a warning letter. A page does not have to be labeled as an advertisement to be reviewed as one. The reason this matters is what happens once a reviewer, like a regulator, decides to act.
What Is at Stake
An FDA warning letter typically comes with a short window to respond. Ignoring the warning can lead to further regulatory follow-up, in some cases a referral to a state board of pharmacy, and because warning letters are public record, the consequences can extend beyond the immediate agency involved. Accrediting bodies frequently review this kind of public information during renewal, and vendor or partner relationships can be affected once an unresolved warning letter becomes visible.
A cease-and-desist letter from a drug manufacturer raises a different but related set of concerns. These letters typically assert that specific language or imagery infringes a trademark or otherwise creates a false impression about the manufacturer’s product. Ignoring one does not resolve the underlying dispute, and it can leave a business exposed to a trademark infringement claim, a request for an injunction requiring the language to come down, and potential liability for damages or the manufacturer’s legal fees, depending on how the matter proceeds. As with an FDA warning letter, the response matters, and how it is handled can affect the outcome.
An Enforcement Myth Worth Retiring
It is a common assumption that language is safe simply because a competitor is already using it. Regulatory review and any related manufacturer dispute are conducted business by business. What another company has not yet been asked to address (as far as you know) says nothing about how your own website will be evaluated.
A Few Things to Look at on Your Site Today
This following is not a comprehensive review checklist but can be a reasonable starting point. A few examples:
- Search your product pages for equivalence language such as “same as,” “identical to,” or “just like,” paired with the name of a specific brand-name medication.
- Check whether any safety, efficacy, or clinical data on your site was originally published for a brand-name product and is now appearing alongside a compounded medication.
- Review your product images to confirm that any packaging or labeling shown does not suggest your company holds a role, such as compounder or manufacturer, that it does not actually hold.
Where This Leaves You
A self-audit may catch some of the more obvious issues, but it will not catch everything, and it is not a substitute for a comprehensive, independent review of your site. Boesen & Snow Law works with telehealth platforms, pharmacies, and compounding pharmacies on marketing and website compliance, including helping clients respond to FDA warning letters and manufacturer cease-and-desist letters when they come up. If this raises questions about your own site, we’re glad to talk it through.
