YMYL: what it means and why Google is especially strict about medicine

Greg K.SEO and analytics at Adcore · LinkedIn

YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life: Google’s name for topics where inaccurate information can seriously harm a person’s health, money or safety. Such pages face higher standards than the rest of the internet, and this is most visible in medicine. Here is what falls under YMYL, how to check your topic and why a rabbit site should not write about tumours.

What YMYL is: your money or your life

“Your money or your life!” On 28 March 1948, the comedian Jack Benny, whose stage character was built on stinginess, heard this line on American radio. The mugger makes his demand, Benny stays silent, the audience is already laughing. The mugger repeats it. “I’m thinking it over!” Benny replies.

Google borrowed the same phrase for matters that are not funny at all. Its rater handbook uses it for topics with a high risk of harm: content about them could significantly affect people’s health, financial stability or safety, or the well-being of society. Put simply, these are topics where a page can decide whether the reader’s wallet and life stay intact.

The harm does not have to fall on the reader. Google sees three circles: the person reading, those affected by that person’s decision, and whole groups of people and society. A father reads about a child’s fever, and it is the child who gets treated. Someone reads a lie about an election, and everyone bears the consequences.

Three large groups of topics and three circles that harm can spread to.

How YMYL and E-E-A-T are connected

E-E-A-T answers the question of what to check, and YMYL answers how strictly. The first describes four qualities: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. The second raises the bar for them where a mistake is costly. Google says so directly:

It is the same in everyday life. You will take a chicken recipe from your neighbour without asking for a diploma. You will not ask her how many pills to take. Same neighbour, only the cost of a mistake has changed.

YMYL is a scale, not yes or no

YMYL is not a switch: Google directly calls it a spectrum, with clear YMYL, definitely not YMYL and everything in between. Most topics on the internet are not YMYL at all and do not need high accuracy. Here are three questions that start almost the same way:

All three examples come from Google’s own table. The difference lies not in the subject but in what happens if the page is wrong. You can see the same across other content types:

Three questions start almost the same way, but the cost of a mistake differs. That is what decides how strictly a page is judged.

Note the pencils. Google specifically warns that you could imagine a harmful page on any subject, say a pencil shop with a virus in a download. But YMYL is defined by the topic itself, not by the fact that someone could spoil it.

How to check your topic: Google’s two questions

When a rater is unsure, the handbook suggests asking just two questions. Try them on the topic of your page:

Why Google checks medicine so strictly

Medical pages are checked especially strictly because people look for this information at their worst moment, and a mistake here can cost their health. You can see this logic on the first page of the handbook. Google writes that a search may be a single question asked during a critical moment of a person’s life, such as [what are the symptoms of a heart attack?], and then comes the line that makes the document worth reading at least once:

The scale is considerable too. According to David Feinberg, then head of Google Health, about 7% of Google’s daily searches in 2019 were health related. That is roughly one search in fourteen.

August 2018: the update nicknamed Medic

On 1 August 2018, Google released a broad core update and said nothing about medicine. Within a week, Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable reviewed over 300 sites whose owners reported changes. Over 42% of them were about medicine, health, fitness and healthy living. He wrote that he had never seen such concentration in one niche and named the update Medic. The sample came from people who filled in a survey themselves, so this is a signal rather than a census. Google itself never used the name and spoke of a global update. But that is when E-A-T became the main topic in SEO, and owners of health sites started reading the rater handbook.

January 2026: Google gets burned itself

The standards for medical content apply to Google too. In January 2026, The Guardian tested AI Overviews on health searches. For a query about normal liver test results, the overview returned a column of numbers without accounting for sex, age or ethnicity. Experts called this dangerous: a person with serious disease could decide all was well and skip the next appointment. After publication, Google removed the overviews for those queries without commenting on individual decisions, although they still appeared for similar wording.

What Google considers the worst

The handbook contains dozens of examples from real pages. Reading them is more useful than any checklist, because you see exactly what earns the lowest ratings.

The rabbit site. Its authors describe themselves as rabbit lovers and breeders. But the site has hundreds of templated question-and-answer articles on human health, including tumours. Lowest rating: scaled content with no value and a deceptive description of the site. Google even explains the trick: take questions from the “People also ask” block and answer them with paraphrased text, often using generative AI.

The highest ratings in the same document go to a body mass index calculator from an institute that is part of the US National Institutes of Health, a reference page on meningitis from a nonprofit medical research group and a page from a hospital that independent rankings place among the best in the country. They share one thing: it is immediately clear who is responsible, and their reputation can be checked independently.

Who gets to speak: the patient or the doctor

On YMYL topics, advice and facts should come from experts, while anyone may share their own experience as long as it is safe and consistent with scientific consensus. This is a case where two pages on one topic can both be good because they are about different things. How to sleep with a pillow under your knee after surgery, an aunt who went through it can tell you better than a textbook. Which painkiller and what dose is for the doctor to decide. Google has a whole section of such pairs:

That is why a doctor need not fear forums, and forums should not pretend to be doctors. Problems start when one is passed off as the other. Google values experience on condition that it is safe and consistent with well-established expert consensus.

Which sites count as YMYL

YMYL applies to page topics, not to whole sites, so one site can have both kinds. An article on symptoms on a clinic’s site is clear YMYL, while a notice about holiday opening hours is not. The most common mistake in articles on YMYL goes like this: “all online stores are YMYL”. Google says otherwise: look at the product. Prescription drugs yes, pencils no.

The breakdown is ours, following Google’s logic: the handbook itself only gives examples, not a closed list.

If your topic is in the middle column, this is not a verdict. It only means that an anonymous text written for rankings stands the least chance here. We have covered separately what to show on a page: where Google looks for E-E-A-T proof, along with a test for your site. And if you need an outside view of a specific site, that is work for an SEO agency.

YMYL FAQ

What does YMYL stand for?

Your Money or Your Life. It is a mugger’s line, which is why the phrase sounds so blunt, and Google uses it for topics where the stakes are real.

Is YMYL a ranking factor?

No. Gary Illyes of Google explained in 2019 that there is no internal YMYL score. Systems recognise topics where mistakes are costly through various signals and give more weight to signs of reliability there.

Are YMYL pages checked by hand?

Not in the sense people often mean. Raters do look at pages, but their rating does not change a specific site’s position: it shows Google whether its systems work well.

Can a blogger without a degree write about health?

About their own experience, yes, if it is safe and consistent with consensus. Advice on treatment and doses without a specialist on the page will have problems both with readers’ trust and with Google’s assessment.

Can YMYL texts be written with AI?

Google does not ban the tool itself, but without human checking such a text is especially risky here. The handbook includes an article on cancer that nobody proofread: the language model’s service phrase remained in the first line, and the end breaks off mid-sentence. Lowest rating. So a specialist’s fact-check is essential, and it is worth showing on the page.

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