YMYL content: what it is and how squirrel detects it

What YMYL means

YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. It is the label Google’s quality rater guidelines use for topics where bad information can cause real harm: medical advice, financial decisions, legal matters, safety, civic information.

Content in those areas is judged more strictly on expertise and trustworthiness than content that is merely wrong about a film. The practical consequence is that attribution, credentials, sourcing and disclaimers stop being nice-to-have.

This rule does not judge the content. It reports which YMYL categories appear on the site, so you know which standard applies.

What squirrel checks

The rule is site-wide. It searches each page’s title, meta description and URL pathname for keywords in three groups, case-insensitively, and counts the pages matching each. The body copy is not searched. It emits up to two checks:

• Skipped when no pages were crawled. Message: No pages available for analysis.
• ymyl-content reports info when any category matched. Message: YMYL content detected - apply higher E-E-A-T standards, listing what was found as Health (14 pages), Finance (3 pages) and Legal (1 pages).
• ymyl-requirements reports info alongside it. Message: YMYL content should have expert authors, disclaimers, and citations.
• ymyl-detection passes when nothing matched. Message: No obvious YMYL content detected.

The three keyword groups cover health terms such as symptoms, treatment, medication and surgery; finance terms such as investment, mortgage, tax and crypto; and legal terms such as lawyer, lawsuit and custody. A keyword anywhere in the title, the description or the path is a match, so a page titled around an unrelated use of credit is counted. Read the counts as a prompt, not a classification. Severity info, weight 5.

Several other E-E-A-T rules are gated on the audit’s own site classification, which is a separate mechanism from this rule’s keyword scan.

How to fix it

Where the categories are right, apply the stricter standard to those sections: named authors with relevant credentials, a disclaimer that says what the content is not, sources a reader can check, and a visible review date.

Where they are wrong, the keyword scan caught an incidental mention. Nothing needs fixing.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["eeat/ymyl-detection"]

Disable all E-E-A-T rules

[rules]
disable = ["eeat/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["eeat/ymyl-detection"]

enable replaces the default ["*"], so this is the only rule selected. Leave disable out: a rule that matches any disable pattern is skipped even when enable names it. Only an enabled setting under a rule’s own [rule_options] table overrides both lists.

Related rules

• eeat/disclaimers: the disclaimers YMYL content needs.
• eeat/author-expertise: the credentials that carry the most weight here.
• eeat/citations: sourcing for claims a reader may act on.
• eeat/editorial-policy: how the content is reviewed before it ships.

E-E-A-T findings ship in every audit next to the SEO, performance and agent experience rules. See Fix SEO issues with AI for how an agent works through a report.

References

• Creating helpful, reliable content, Google Search Central

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com and open the E-E-A-T section of the report. The site is reported with the YMYL categories found and their page counts. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.