What can a fertility clinic publish that the HFEA has not already published?

What happens when a fertility patient searches a treatment add-on?

They meet the regulator before they meet you. HFEA maintains a page called treatment add-ons with limited evidence, it carries a rating for each add-on, and it opens by telling patients that for most of them routine cycles of proven fertility treatment are effective without using any add-ons.

It goes further than that. HFEA suggests that a self-funding patient may want to think about whether it might be better to pay for multiple cycles of IVF or IUI rather than spending large sums on a single cycle with add-ons that have not been proven effective.

That is the material sitting in the corpus when somebody asks whether time-lapse imaging or an endometrial scratch is worth paying for. A clinic page selling the add-on is not competing with another clinic on that query. It is competing with its own regulator, on a page the regulator wrote for exactly that question.

Why is a fertility clinic's AEO problem different from every other clinic's?

Because in every other trade we write about, the operator holds facts nobody else publishes. A dentist's registration number, a vet's out-of-hours arrangement, an HVAC contractor's pricing method. The job is to write them down.

Fertility is the exception. The headline number a patient wants is already published about you, by your regulator, in a standardised form, alongside every competitor's. HFEA's Choose a Fertility Clinic exists precisely so patients do not have to take a clinic's word for it.

So the question is not whether your success rate gets quoted. Some version of it already can be. The question is which version, and whether the one on your website agrees with the one the regulator publishes. If those two numbers differ, the difference is not a marketing advantage. It is a discrepancy sitting in plain sight between two sources that will be retrieved together.

The advertising rules governing how you may present that figure are a separate matter with real enforcement behind them, and we covered those in the rules on advertising fertility success rates. This guide is about what gets used.

What do the five HFEA add-on ratings actually mean?

HFEA uses five ratings, with symbols and colours, to show whether an add-on is effective at improving treatment outcomes according to evidence from studies. The wording is worth having exactly, because the gap between the rating and the average clinic's copy is the whole problem.

• On balance, findings from high quality evidence shows this add-on is effective at improving the treatment outcome.
• On balance, it is not clear whether this add-on is effective at improving the treatment outcome.
• We cannot rate the effectiveness of this add-on at improving the treatment outcome as there is insufficient moderate or high quality evidence.
• On balance, the findings from moderate or high quality evidence shows that this add-on has no effect on the treatment outcome.
• There are potential safety concerns and, or on balance, the findings from moderate or high quality evidence shows that this add-on may reduce treatment effectiveness.

Why is the HFEA list's inclusion criterion the fact that matters?

Because of what it says about everything on the list, before you look at any individual rating.

HFEA explains that it provides information on add-ons that meet a set of criteria: they are additional treatments or tests offered to the general patient population in licensed UK clinics, there are published studies claiming to demonstrate an improvement, but evidence of effectiveness for use in a clinical setting is lacking or absent, and patients need unbiased information about effectiveness and risks.

Read the third clause again. Appearing on the list is not neutral. The list exists for add-ons where the evidence of effectiveness is lacking or absent, which is why the page is titled treatment add-ons with limited evidence rather than treatment add-ons.

There is a further line clinics should know the source of. An agreement between HFEA and other professional and patient bodies, the 19 October 2023 consensus statement, says that treatments with no strong evidence of their safety or effectiveness should only be offered in a research setting, and that patients should not be charged extra to take part in research, including clinical trials. A page selling an unproven add-on at a premium is arguing with that statement whether or not it mentions it.

Why does the HFEA Code of Practice make a clinic link to the rating?

This is the part most clinics treat as a compliance tax and it is the single best content opportunity on the site.

HFEA states that under the Code of Practice, clinics must give patients a clear idea of what any treatment add-on will involve, how likely it is to increase their chance of a successful pregnancy and how much it will cost, and link to the HFEA ratings system.

So the outbound link to the regulator's rating is mandatory. Most clinic pages bury it, which is the worst of both worlds: the obligation is met on paper, the patient does not see it, and the page still says nothing specific.

The version that works does the opposite. Name the add-on, state its current HFEA rating in the regulator's own words, give the cost, and then write the paragraph nobody else writes, which is why this clinic offers it, or declines to, and for which patients. That paragraph is a fact about your clinic, it cannot be lifted from anywhere else, and it directly answers the question the patient is actually asking, which is not does this work in general but should I pay for it.

What can a fertility clinic publish that HFEA cannot?

Everything downstream of the number. HFEA can tell a patient what your live birth rate is. It cannot tell them how you got it or what happens to them specifically.

• Who you will and will not treat, including any age, BMI or AMH thresholds, stated as criteria rather than implied.
• What your standard protocol is, and what makes you deviate from it.
• What happens after a failed cycle, including whether the review is included and who conducts it.
• Your position on each add-on you offer, against the current HFEA rating, with the cost.
• How many cycles a typical patient at your clinic has before a live birth, which is a different question from a per-cycle rate.
• What is inside the headline price and what is billed separately, including storage, medication and any add-on.
• Where the NHS pathway ends and the self-funded one begins in your area, which varies and which patients search constantly.

What does a quotable fertility clinic page look like?

How do you tell whether fertility clinic pages are being used?

Search Console's generative AI performance report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, reports impressions only with no clicks, position or query data, and Google says it reached all websites worldwide as of 31 August 2026.

Two cautions specific to this sector. The first is the lag. Fertility decisions run over months rather than days, which we went through in why fertility patients take months to choose, so a month of impression data tells you almost nothing about whether the content worked. The second is geography, because a clinic competes across a whole metro area rather than a suburb, which changes what good coverage even looks like and which we set out in local SEO for a fertility clinic across a metro area.

Everything in this guide is the UK regulator's framework. HFEA has no equivalent in most other markets, and clinics elsewhere should check what their own regulator publishes about them before assuming nobody has. The general list of things no clinic needs to buy for any of this is in the dental version of this question.