YMYL means “Your Money or Your Life”: topics where inaccurate information can significantly affect health, financial stability, safety or wellbeing.
Scope and boundary
YMYL means “Your Money or Your Life”: topics where inaccurate information can significantly affect a person’s health, financial stability, safety or wellbeing.
Practical workflow
Define the decision risk, review accuracy and evidence, and verify visible authorship, dates, source context, conflicts and correction paths. I check whether trust signals are visible and machine-readable, but I do not create an invented E-E-A-T score.
Apply YMYL to a concrete condition
YMYL review is controlled by the risk of harm from an inaccurate decision. For example, a page about a health, financial or safety choice should state its scope, cite appropriate primary or professional sources, avoid personalised instructions it cannot safely support, and make authorship or review accountability clear where relevant. Test the visible page for stale dates, unsupported certainty, missing conflicts and broken citations. A disclaimer cannot make unsafe advice trustworthy.
What to verify
For a review example, take one material claim and trace it from the visible sentence to its cited source, date, scope and author or reviewer context. If the source is outdated, indirect or unable to support the certainty of the claim, revise the claim before adding more trust signals. Revisit these checks after material policy or evidence changes. The verification goal is safer, more accountable information, not a numerical E-E-A-T score or a guaranteed ranking effect.
Common mistakes
Avoid author boxes or schema as decoration when the central high-stakes advice is unsupported.