YMYL (Your Money or Your Life)
YMYL, short for Your Money or Your Life, is Google's label for topics that could significantly affect a person's health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare of society, which its quality raters hold to the highest standards.
Also called Your Money or Your Life
- Last reviewed
- 3 sources, linked
- 4 related terms
What it means
The term comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the handbook for the people who rate search results so Google can test changes to its systems. Health and safety is one of the YMYL categories, and addiction treatment sits squarely inside it: a misleading page can push a family toward the wrong care.
Google says rater scores do not directly change rankings. Its own documentation also says its systems give even more weight to content with strong E-E-A-T on YMYL topics, so the raters' bar is a fair description of the bar the systems aim for.
For clearly YMYL pages, the guidelines ask for accuracy and consistency with well-established expert consensus, and pages that could mislead people in harmful ways can be rated lowest.
Why it matters for your website
Every treatment page is YMYL, so write and sign it like one. Name the clinical reviewer, cite primary sources for medical claims, date the review, and never publish an outcome number you cannot back up.
Keep the business facts consistent: license, accreditation, address and services should read the same on your site, your Google Business Profile and every directory.
Sources
The facts on this page about a law, a regulator, a clinical standard or a platform come from these sources. Each link opens the original in a new tab.
- GoogleSearch Quality Rater Guidelines (General Guidelines) (opens in a new tab)
- GoogleSearch Quality Rater Guidelines: An Overview (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search CentralCreating helpful, reliable, people-first content (opens in a new tab)
Last reviewed
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