YMYL pages
YMYL pages, short for Your Money or Your Life, cover topics where bad information could hurt someone's health, finances or safety.
YMYL pages, short for Your Money or Your Life, are pages on subjects where bad information could seriously hurt someone: their health, their money, their safety, or their rights. Medical advice, investing, tax, legal help and safety instructions are all YMYL. Google's search quality rater guidelines use the term for the pages it holds to the highest standard.
For a marketer, it matters if your business touches any of these subjects. On YMYL topics, Google looks harder for signs that a page is trustworthy, and a thin or anonymous page has a much harder time ranking.
What counts
It's not only hospitals and banks. A supplement shop, a mortgage broker, a pharmacy, a solicitor, a home security company, and a page about whether a food is safe in pregnancy can all be YMYL. A coffee roaster's brewing guide isn't, but its page claiming coffee lowers blood pressure would be.
How to write YMYL pages
Show who wrote the page and why they know. Cite sources. Keep facts current and dated. Be clear about what you sell and how to reach you. Google's guidance on helpful content and its idea of E-E-A-T, which asks how much first-hand experience, expertise and trust a page shows, both weigh most heavily here.
For example, Fernhill Coffee writes about caffeine in pregnancy. Instead of a quick blog post, it has a dietitian write and sign the page, links the health guidance it draws on, and dates the last review.
YMYL in AI answers
AI platforms also tend to be careful on these subjects. They often add warnings, lean on official and well-known sources, and may decline to recommend products at all. So it's harder to be named, and a wrong claim about you in an answer can do real harm, like a wrong dose, a wrong fee or a wrong safety warning.
In AnswerOrbit
Add the facts that must be right, such as prices, fees or what a product is approved for, in Claims. We check every claim the answers make about you against them, and only mark one as contradicted when we can quote the sentence that says it.