YMYL (Your Money or Your Life)
YMYL, short for Your Money or Your Life, is Google's name for topics where bad information could cause harm. Its Search Quality Rater Guidelines describe topics that "could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society." The guide's groups are health or safety, financial security, government, civics and society, and other.
Source: Google, Search Quality Rater Guidelines (September 11, 2025), section 2.3, checked October 29, 2026
What YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) means for your business
A topic isn't YMYL just because someone could build a harmful page about it. The guide's own example is rainbows: a page about them could hide a virus download, but rainbows aren't a YMYL topic, because the topic itself can't hurt anyone.
Raters don't set rankings. Google's advice for site owners says its systems give even more weight to content with strong E-E-A-T on these topics.
Clinics, accountants and financial planners all work on YMYL topics. The guide doesn't give law its own group, but in our reading, legal advice that affects someone's money or safety fits the groups it does have. The guide says first-hand experience can count here, like people sharing how they coped with an illness, while some advice must come from experts, like how to invest for retirement. On those pages, we'd put a real, qualified name on the advice and link the sources it rests on.
If your pages give health, money or legal guidance without showing who stands behind it, writing pages a careful reader can check is how our citation-ready content work handles it.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview cited SEO tool blogs, Search Engine Land and YouTube, not Google's guide, and listed happiness and legal rights, which the current guide doesn't name. ChatGPT named the guide, listed legal rights too, and cited nothing.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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