Can You Use AI To Write For YMYL Sites?

Can You Use AI To Write For YMYL Sites?

“Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) is a website containing content that, if inaccurate or misleading, could significantly impact a person’s happiness, health, financial stability, or safety. The website faces stricter standards for ranking in Google search results than other types of content.

If a piece of content could influence a significant life decision, it likely falls under the YMTL umbrella.

Industries like finance, healthcare, legal services, and some e-commerce sectors are heavily impacted by YMYL updates owing to the significant influence their content can have on users’ lives.

YMYL content has the potential to impact users’ financial, health, and legal decisions, which is why Google may enforce higher standards for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

YMYL and AI-generated content

Reviewing and validating any AI content used on your site ensures its originality, accuracy, and value to your site’s visitors.

In April 2025, Google explicitly added generative AI guidance to its Search Rater Guidelines. In brief, it made two points:

1. Generative AI can be a useful tool
2. It can also lead to misuse

Coming to the use of AI for restarting, paraphrasing, or outrighting copy other content, it’s likely going to be rated as having low quality.

With YMYL content, there is the added risk of generative AI hallucinations that could lead to harmful information or advice.

Use generative AI with YMYL content

Ways of safely using AI for boosting your YMYL content without violating Google’s guidelines and subjecting content to the bottom of the SERPs:

• Discover gaps: Uncovering pesky content gaps with a crawling tool and AI analysis
• Optimize workflows: AI tools are great at analysing processes and automating repetitive tasks
• Create outlines: Feed in source materials, competitor pages, and any other information you want to include on your page to get a comprehensive outline of the topic
• Cite sources: For finding facts or claims, AI helps in locating the source and formats a proper citation.
• Graphic enhancement: Find opportunities for image placement, graphics, and data visualizations for making engaging content
• Link suggestions: Use of AI for suggesting internal and external links, especially for high-converting and most engaging pages.

However, writing for YMYL requires more consideration and author credibility than other content.

AI systems fail at YMYL content, providing bland sameness where unique expertise and authority matter the most. AI produces unsupported medical claims 50% of the time, and hallucinates court holdings 75% of the time.

Google Treats YMYL Content With Algorithmic Scrutiny

Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines states that “for pages about clear YMYL topics, we have very high Page Quality rating standards” and these pages “require the most scrutiny.”

The guidelines define YMYL as topics that “could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people.”

YMYL content has the potential to impact users’ financial, health, and legal decisions, which is why Google may enforce higher standards for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Hiring subject matter experts in your field for creating content, thoroughly fact-checking information, and including clear author bios and citations from reputable sources.

AI Error Rates Make It Unsuitable for YMYL Topics

A Stanford HAI study from February 2024 tested GPT-4 with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

Results: 30% of individual statements were unsupported—nearly 50% of responses contained at least one unsupported statement. Google’s Gemini Pro achieved 10% fully supported responses.

Men’s Journal published its first AI-generated health article in February 2023. Dr Bradley Anawalt of the University of Washington Medical Centre identified 18 specific errors.

He described “persistent factual mistakes and mischaracterizations of medical science,” including equating different medical terms, claiming unsupported links between diet and symptoms, and providing unfounded health warnings.

Google Prioritizes What AI Can’t Provide

AI can produce technically accurate content that reads like a medical textbook or legal reference. What it can’t produce is practitioner insight. The kind that comes from treating patients daily or representing defendants in court.

AI’s Design Guarantees Content Homogenization

UCLA research documents what researchers term a “death spiral of homogenization.”

AI systems default toward population-scale mean preferences because LLMs predict the most statistically probable next word.

How Google Verifies Author Expertise

Google doesn’t just look at content in isolation.

The search engine builds connections in its knowledge graph for verifying that authors have the expertise they claim.

This verification is robust for established experts. Medical professionals with publications on Google Scholar, attorneys with bar registrations, and financial advisors with FINRA records all have verifiable digital footprints.

An author’s credentials, publications, speaking engagements, and professional affiliations can all be linked to their name by Google.

The Real-World Stakes of YMYL Misinformation

According to a 2019 University of Baltimore study, misinformation costs the global economy USD 78 billion annually. Deepfake financial fraud affected 50% of businesses in 2024, with an average loss of USD 450,000 per incident.

The stakes differ from other content types. YMYL errors cause injury, financial mistakes, and erosion of institutional trust.

US federal law prescribes up to 5 years in prison for spreading false information causing harm, and 20 years if someone is suffering severe bodily injury, and life imprisonment if someone dies as a result.

Between 2011 and 2022, 78 countries passed misinformation laws.

Validation matters more for YMYL because consequences cascade and compound.

Misinformation can cause medical choices to be delayed, which can aggravate illnesses beyond recovery. Poor investing decisions lead to long-term financial difficulties. Rights may be lost as a result of incorrect legal advice. These results cannot be undone. Knowing these stakes makes it easier to understand what readers are searching for when they look up YMYL issues.

What Readers Want From YMYL Content

Want to connect with practitioners who understand their situation

Readers can tell when content comes from genuine experience versus when it’s been assembled from other articles.

The publishers who treat YMYL content as a volume game, whether through AI or human content farms, are facing a difficult path. While the ones who treat it as a credibility signal have a sustainable model.

 You can use AI as a tool in your process, but you can’t use it as a replacement for human expertise.