What YMYL means
YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. It's a term from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines used to flag pages on topics where low-quality content could cause real harm to a user's wellbeing — financial, physical, emotional, or civic.
The key word is could. YMYL isn't a separate algorithm; it's a category of topic. When quality raters evaluate a YMYL page, they're instructed to apply stricter standards for trust, expertise, and accuracy than they would on a low-stakes topic like "best hiking boots" or "how to fold a napkin."
Which topics count
Google's examples of YMYL topics include:
- Finance — investments, taxes, retirement planning, insurance, loans, mortgages, cryptocurrency.
- Medical & health — conditions, treatments, drugs, mental health, nutrition, fitness advice that could affect health.
- Legal — rights, contracts, immigration, criminal law, divorce, wills.
- Civic & news — elections, voting, government services, major news events.
- Safety — emergency preparedness, product safety, how to do something with real physical risk.
- Groups — content about groups that could affect their welfare or reputation.
YMYL isn't binary. Google describes it as a spectrum. A comparison of two savings accounts is clearly YMYL. A piece about the history of banking is probably not. A product review for a mortgage-tracking app sits in the middle — rate it accordingly.
Why Google treats them differently
The logic is straightforward: the cost of a wrong answer is higher. If Google returns a bad result for "best pasta recipe," someone eats a mediocre dinner. If it returns a bad result for "symptoms of a stroke" or "how to invest my super," someone can lose their health or their life savings.
So Google's raters apply a stricter bar on YMYL pages: they're more willing to mark a page as low-quality for vague authorship, missing credentials, unsourced claims, or trust signals that would be forgivable on a lower-stakes topic.
YMYL and E-E-A-T together
The easiest way to think about it: E-E-A-T is the framework; YMYL is the difficulty multiplier. On a non-YMYL topic, decent E-E-A-T is usually enough. On a YMYL topic, the same amount of E-E-A-T signal won't cut it.
In practice, this means:
- Expertise becomes nearly non-negotiable. A financial adviser writing about retirement accounts gets a much higher ceiling than an anonymous blog.
- Experience still matters — "I've been through this" helps in health and finance — but it's almost never enough on its own.
- Authoritativeness weights harder. Being cited by mainstream outlets, regulators, or peers within the field is valuable evidence.
- Trust is the gatekeeper. Missing privacy policies, unclear ownership, unsupported claims — these break YMYL trust in a way they wouldn't on lighter topics.
The higher standard, in practice
If a page falls into YMYL, here's what changes concretely for how I'd build it.
Author
- Real person. Real name. Real photo.
- Bio including relevant qualifications — licence numbers for regulated professions (financial advisers, lawyers, doctors), institutional affiliations, years of experience.
- Author page with a clear scope ("I write about Australian personal tax" is useful; "I write about finance" is not).
- Person schema connected to the Article schema via
@id.
Sourcing
- Link claims to primary sources — the ATO, the Reserve Bank, peer-reviewed studies, official government pages. Not competitors' blog posts.
- Quote actual figures with dates attached. Tax thresholds from "recently" will embarrass you.
- If you're summarising research, cite the paper, not the news article about the paper.
Caveats & scope
- State what the content is and isn't. "General information, not personal advice" matters legally and for trust.
- Flag limits of the advice — jurisdiction (AU only?), time sensitivity ("as of 2026"), audience (DIY investors, not businesses).
- Make corrections visible, not silent. Show the old figure crossed out if the change is material.
Trust surface
- About page naming the actual humans and organisation behind the site.
- Contact channels that reach a real person, not a no-reply.
- Published and updated dates visible above the fold, not just in schema.
- No affiliate links without disclosure. Disclose even when you don't legally have to.
YMYL content checklist
Before publishing a page you suspect is YMYL:
- Does the author have documented, topic-specific expertise (credentials, licence, experience)?
- Is every non-obvious claim linked to a primary source?
- Are any numbers, thresholds, or laws stamped with a date?
- Is the scope and jurisdiction of the advice stated?
- Is the relationship between the author, the content, and the publisher explicit (in copy and in schema)?
- Does the site have a real About, Contact, Privacy, and — if applicable — a disclosures page?
- Would a regulator in your field see this and wince?
If the answer to that last question is yes, the page isn't ready to ship.