Jargon Buster / YMYL (Your Money or Your Life)
YMYL (Your Money or Your Life).
Search & AI VisibilityGoogle's label for topics that can affect someone's health, money, safety or wellbeing, judged more strictly.
What is YMYL?
YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) is the term Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines use for topics that could significantly affect a person's health, financial stability, safety, or the welfare of society. Pages on these topics are held to a higher standard of trust. Medical advice, financial guidance, legal information and content about elections or public institutions all fall within it.
Why it matters
If you run a clinic, financial advice firm, law practice, insurer or any business giving advice that affects people's money or wellbeing, your content is judged more strictly. Thin, anonymous or unsupported advice is less likely to rank, however well optimised it is. That raises the bar for content in regulated sectors, but it also protects firms with genuine expertise from competition by content farms.
The main areas
- Health and safety Medical conditions, treatments, medicines, mental health and anything that could cause physical harm.
- Financial security Investments, pensions, tax, loans, insurance and major purchases.
- Legal matters Advice on legal rights, divorce, wills or employment disputes, where bad information has real consequences.
- Government, civics and society Voting, elections, public services and information that shapes trust in public institutions.
The honest view
YMYL is often treated as a label that only matters to hospitals and banks. In practice it covers a large share of professional services content.
The common mistake is publishing generic advice, sometimes AI-written, on high-stakes topics with no named expert, no sources and no review date. The underrated response is old-fashioned: have a qualified person write or review the content, say so on the page, and update it when the rules change.
What to do about it
If your business touches health, money, legal rights or safety, list every page that gives advice. For each, check there is a named, qualified author or reviewer, a date it was last reviewed, and references to primary sources such as legislation, regulators or clinical guidance. Remove or rewrite anything out of date. Make your regulatory status, such as FCA or SRA registration, easy to verify on the site.
Related terms.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness: the qualities Google looks for in credible content.
Search & AI VisibilitySee more SSEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
The work of earning more visibility and enquiries from unpaid search results on Google and other engines.
Search & AI VisibilitySee more AAI Overviews
AI-written summaries Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to the pages it drew on.
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