What is YMYL (Your Money or Your Life)?
YMYL is Google's classification for content topics that could impact a user's future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety. Pages in YMYL categories — medical advice, financial products, legal information, news on civic events, child safety — are held to substantially higher E-E-A-T standards by Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
What to know in practice
- Examples: prescription drug information, investment advice, mortgage calculators, divorce attorneys, vaccine guidance, election news, suicide hotlines.
- On YMYL pages, the 'Trustworthiness' factor of E-E-A-T is weighted highest — anonymous content, unsourced medical/financial claims, and content lacking author credentials face structural ranking penalties.
- AI Overviews are more conservative on YMYL queries — they suppress AI-generated answers and cite established authorities (Mayo Clinic for health, IRS for tax, .gov for government) instead of independent blogs.
- Required for YMYL content to perform: named author with verifiable credentials, dated content with last-reviewed timestamp, sources cited inline with links to primary research, transparent publisher identity.
Common misconception
YMYL isn't a single binary tag — it's a spectrum. A blog post about budgeting tips is moderate-YMYL; the same site's mortgage calculator is high-YMYL. The required E-E-A-T standard scales with the impact severity, not the topic category alone.
Related terms
- E-E-A-T → SEO & AEO
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) → SEO & AEO
- Schema Markup → SEO & AEO