Entity and trust · Branch E.A, Authorship and expertise
E-05 YMYL topics must meet higher accuracy and expert review standards
For health, finance, legal, safety and similar high-impact content, the standard for primary sources, scope limits and suitable expert review must be raised.
- Scope
- YMYL and high-impact content
- Priority
- Gate. A FAIL stops publish or launch.
- Quality bucket
- Entity and trust
- Legacy coverage
- SEO-18
Why it matters
Readers can be harmed if advice on health, money, law or safety is wrong or goes beyond what the evidence supports. Search engines and AI answer engines have good reason to distrust unreviewed pages on these topics, so they are less likely to surface or cite them. Google's people-first content guidance sets a higher bar here because the cost of error is higher.
How to implement
- Label which URLs are YMYL so they can be handled separately.
- Require a named expert to review each of these pages before it goes live.
- Replace weak references with official and primary sources.
- State clearly what the page covers, what it does not cover and what the risks are.
- Switch off automatic publishing for YMYL content so every release passes a human check.
Checklist
- Make expert review mandatory.
- Use official and primary sources.
- Explain the scope limits and the risks.
- Disable automatic publishing.
How to audit
- Check YMYL-labelled URLs for expert review and source coverage.
How UltimateSEO checks this automatically
This control needs human evidence: the expert review and source standard applied to YMYL pages, with reviewer identity and date.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Sources
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.1, revised 2026-10-07. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.