YMYL: what "Your Money or Your Life" means for SEO

YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. It comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the handbook Google gives to the people who rate search results to help it test its systems. YMYL topics are ones where poor information could significantly harm a person's health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare of society.

Examples of YMYL topics

• Health and medical information, such as symptoms, treatments or drug dosages.
• Financial advice, such as investments, taxes, loans and insurance.
• Legal information, such as rights, contracts and immigration.
• Safety, such as emergency procedures or product safety.
• News and civic information about elections, government and public institutions.
• Shopping where money is at stake: payments and high-value purchases.

How Google treats YMYL

The rater guidelines ask raters to hold YMYL pages to a higher standard of trust, experience, expertise and authoritativeness (E-E-A-T). Raters don't change rankings directly; their ratings help Google evaluate its systems. Google's guide to ranking systems also describes reliable-information systems that aim to show authoritative pages and demote low-quality content.

Google has also said E-E-A-T isn't a ranking factor in itself. What matters is that the page shows the qualities raters look for.

What helps YMYL pages

1. Say who wrote and reviewed the content, with real credentials, and link to an author page.
2. Cite primary sources: official bodies, studies, laws.
3. Date the content and keep it updated when facts change.
4. Make it easy to find who runs the site and how to contact them.
5. Don't overstate claims. Be clear about uncertainty.