Creating YMYL and EEAT content for pharma and healthcare brands

The blog draws on our many years of experience helping health and pharma brands to navigate search engine optimisation requirements. By the end, we demystify the content requirements Google lays out for health web copy in traditional and AI search.

EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Google created these guidelines to judge the quality of web content so they can list useful pages at the top. To do so, they create frameworks to judge whether websites offer relevant and helpful content.

The EEAT framework (previously just EAT) prioritises content that is credible and legitimate by asking questions like:

• Has a person or organisation with relevant experience created the content? In a healthcare context, this could be an interview with a patient telling their personal story of receiving a treatment.
• Does the content demonstrate expertise? In the world of pharma, this could mean a video narrated by a healthcare professional with years of experience working in a particular field, noting their professional accreditation and achievements.
• Are the sources of information shown authoritative? Here in the UK, the NHS website would be considered an authority in the arena of health, as would established charities and professional bodies. Blog posts written by lay individuals, on the other hand, would be unlikely to be considered to have authority on the subject – though they may have experience.
• Ultimately and most importantly, can the website and the content shown be trusted? As web users, we constantly make assumptions about whether a website is trustworthy, and search engines do the same. Factors at play here range from whether it’s easy to identify and contact the organisation behind the content, to whether the site loads quickly and smoothly.

YMYL takes the principles of EEAT one step further, and is highly relevant for websites that touch on topics relating to health and medical care. YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life” – so called because it relates to any subject matter which could have an impact on the readers’ finances, health, wellbeing or livelihood.

Google understands that a website providing information about healthcare treatments or disease diagnosis could have a significant impact on the lives of those reading. In other words, distributing incorrect information carries a high likelihood of harm. So, the content must be both comprehensible and correct. Google therefore scrutinises YMYL content to a higher degree than the everyday EEAT criteria.

Google’s search quality rater guidelines state that they have stringent standards for YMYL content “because low quality pages could potentially negatively impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society.”

It stands to reason that any industry directly relating to health, finances or safety should be concerned about YMYL. However, even for a pharma company, not every single page on a website may be considered YMYL – only those with the potential to do harm to an individual or society if they were to contain incorrect information. ‘About us’ pages, company updates or other niche content could fall outside the YMYL bracket, for example.

On the other hand, industries that don’t directly relate to the above topics may find themselves drifting into YMYL territory. For example, if they create content that touches on a sensitive niche, such as a restaurant giving nutritional advice.

As has been explained, the majority of content created by a healthcare or pharmaceutical organisation falls in the YMYL bracket. All content must prove itself to be true, reliable and supported by credible sources. Luckily, these items tend to go hand-in-hand with the compliance checks that our medical copywriters run. However, there are many additional factors needed to signal to Google that content is legitimate, credible, reliable and trustworthy, as shown at the end of this article.

As of 2026, Google has yet to publish explicit details on how EEAT factors influence its AI search overviews. However, valuable insights can be gleaned from Google’s guidance documents, such as “How AI Overviews in Search Work.”

According to Google, AI overviews:

• Are based on the same search quality and safety systems used in traditional search

• Are designed to only show high-quality results

• Are held to a higher standard for YMYL queries

It’s important to note that Google has never assigned a formal ‘EEAT score’ to content. Rather, EEAT has functioned as a set of guiding principles. This remains true in AI search, but there is growing evidence that these guidelines are evolving into a more active, technical trust filter. Early reports indicate a strong correlation between robust EEAT signals and likelihood of being visible in AI overviews.

For health content, it’s reasonable to expect that AI systems demand the same strict trust signals as in traditional search. Moreover, AI appears to rely on technical trust indicators such as structured data schemas and author credentials to accurately discover, interpret, and cite health-related information.

Ultimately, both EEAT and YMYL are attempts by Google to make sure they promote quality content from legitimate organisations, backed by relevant, trustworthy sources. Healthcare and pharmaceutical companies must make sure they fit this description to achieve SEO success. But it is not enough to simply be a legitimate and credible organisation – you must also demonstrate this fact. So, when we optimise content for a medical website, we take steps aligned with the principles behind Google’s search quality rater guidelines.

At the website level:

• Make it easy to discover which organisation is responsible for the website – especially if this is different to the brand name of the site
• Demonstrate the qualifications and professional credentials of the organisation responsible for the website
• Make sure organisation contact details are easy to find
• Where possible, outline the website’s editorial process, to show due diligence in content creation
• Follow User Experience best practices to create a site that runs quickly and smoothly, and is easy to navigate and use. Make sure all functionality works, adhere to all accessibility principles, and follow data protection principles around cookies
• Implement Organization schema on the most suitable page on your website, to provide contextual information about your organisation to Google

Within individual content pieces:

• Make sure every page is unique, high quality, accurate and reliable
• Use keyword search intent modelling to identify the topics and queries that your market are looking for, and create content which directly answers their search queries
• Explicitly note sources behind information wherever possible, including linking to external references if relevant
• Explicitly reference individual experts related to content, where possible – for example, linking to a separate author page with details of the person’s accreditations and experience
• Regularly check all content to ensure it is up to date and still correct

Still not sure how to make sure you are following YMYL and EEAT best practices? SEO can be overwhelming, as it comprises both offsite content considerations and onsite technical implementation. As experts in both search engine optimisation and pharmaceutical digital marketing, the Varn Health team are well placed to help. Get in touch to find out how we can work with you to optimise your healthcare website for SEO and GEO success.