The marketer that prompted Google to ban rehab ads in the UK keeps coming up first in search results
Shortly after a Verge report about deceptive rehab marketing on Google last September, the search giant temporarily banned ads on rehab-related searches in the U.S., which had been netting them an estimated $78 million annually. After a January Sunday Times story exposed similar practices in the U.K., focusing on a referral company called Addiction Helper, Google banned ads on rehab searches there, too.
When the new policy was enacted, The Intercept ran a story criticizing the policy for benefiting large companies with good S.E.O., noting that companies adept at gaming search can appear above unbiased sources of information like the federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration. Shortly after that story, SAMHSA’s…
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