# YMYL (Your Money or Your Life)

YMYL is Google's classification for content topics that could impact a user's future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety. Pages in YMYL categories, medical advice, financial products, legal information, news on civic events, child safety, are held to substantially higher E-E-A-T standards by Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

Canonical: https://myleadsfactory.com/glossary/ymyl

## In depth

- Examples: prescription drug information, investment advice, mortgage calculators, divorce attorneys, vaccine guidance, election news, suicide hotlines.
- On YMYL pages, the 'Trustworthiness' factor of E-E-A-T is weighted highest, anonymous content, unsourced medical/financial claims, and content lacking author credentials face structural ranking penalties.
- AI Overviews are more conservative on YMYL queries, they suppress AI-generated answers and cite established authorities (Mayo Clinic for health, IRS for tax, .gov for government) instead of independent blogs.
- Required for YMYL content to perform: named author with verifiable credentials, dated content with last-reviewed timestamp, sources cited inline with links to primary research, transparent publisher identity.

## Common misconception

YMYL isn't a single binary tag; it's a spectrum. A blog post about budgeting tips is moderate-YMYL; the same site's mortgage calculator is high-YMYL. The required E-E-A-T standard scales with the impact severity, not the topic category alone.

Source: [Google: Search Quality Rater Guidelines (PDF, Section 2.3 covers YMYL)](https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/hsw-sqrg.pdf)

## Related terms

- https://myleadsfactory.com/glossary/e-e-a-t
- https://myleadsfactory.com/glossary/aeo
- https://myleadsfactory.com/glossary/schema-markup