YMYL, short for “Your Money or Your Life,” is Google’s label for topics that could seriously affect a person’s health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare of society. Google’s guidance on helpful content says its systems give even more weight to content showing strong experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust (E-E-A-T) on these topics.
YMYL is more than a guideline concept. In his analysis of the 2024 Google API leak, Mike King found classifier scores for YMYL health and YMYL news, plus a prediction for “fringe queries” Google hasn’t seen before, to decide whether they count as YMYL. He also found YMYL scored at the chunk level, meaning sections of a page can be judged separately. One careless paragraph of financial advice on an otherwise solid page is a section Google can single out.
Which B2B topics count as YMYL
Google’s examples lean toward consumer topics, but plenty of B2B content touches money, health or safety. These are the categories where I’d apply YMYL standards by default:
| B2B topic | Why it can count as YMYL |
|---|---|
| Tax, accounting and payroll software | Advice affects a business’s or person’s financial standing and legal obligations |
| Payments and fintech | Errors can cost money directly |
| Cybersecurity | Bad guidance can lead to breaches, data loss and financial damage |
| Health tech and clinical software | Content can influence care decisions |
| Legal and compliance | Wrong advice creates regulatory and legal exposure |
A product feature page for a firewall isn’t medical advice. A guide telling a CFO how to handle a tax filing deadline is closer to YMYL than most marketing teams treat it.
How Google treats YMYL content
Google says trust is the most important part of E-E-A-T, and that for YMYL topics content must be highly accurate and consistent with established expert consensus. Its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines train human raters to judge exactly this. Google is clear that raters don’t control rankings. Their ratings show whether its algorithms are working, the way a restaurant uses feedback cards. Read the guidelines as a description of what Google’s systems aim to reward, not a checklist that scores your page.
What YMYL means for a B2B content programme
- Put a real byline on advice content, linked to an author page with the person’s credentials. Google’s guidance treats fabricated author profiles, including AI-generated headshots and made-up names, as deception.
- Name the expert who reviewed the page, and what they checked.
- Cite primary sources: the regulator, the standard or the original study, not a blog that summarised it.
- Date every page that gives advice, and update the date only when the advice changes.
- Keep claims inside expert consensus. A contrarian take on SEO tactics is fine. A contrarian take on tax law needs a qualified author and a source.
YMYL topics can still earn AI visibility. For a Canadian taxation micro-SaaS product, a financial topic Google treats with extra care, structured content and technical SEO earned 76.2K Microsoft Copilot citations across 8 pages in 12 months.
Where YMYL caution goes too far
Some teams treat every page as YMYL and hedge everything into mush. That backfires. A page that won’t commit to an answer is less useful to readers and gives AI tools nothing to quote. Apply YMYL standards to pages that advise on money, health, safety or legal obligations, and write everything else with normal conviction. The test is simple: if a reader acted on this page and it was wrong, could they lose money, data or their health? If yes, it’s YMYL.
Common mistakes
- Publishing financial, security or compliance advice with no named author.
- Citing secondary blogs instead of the regulator or standard itself.
- Letting advice pages go stale after the rules change.
- Assuming B2B content is exempt because the reader is a business.
- Hedging every sentence, so the page answers nothing.
Related terms
E-E-A-T · Entity SEO · Topical authority · Structured data · AI Overviews
Writing for a security or compliance audience? See how I approach SEO for cybersecurity vendors.
