Google's YMYL assessment: a checklist for clinic websites

Every page of a clinic website falls, in Google's eyes, under "Your Money or Your Life". What that scope means and how a single treatment article passes review was covered at the text level in our hair transplant and YMYL article. This article moves one layer up: not the text itself but the whole of the site that carries it. Starting from the guidelines Google publishes for its quality raters, whose latest version is dated 11 September 2025, we collected the items a clinic site has to meet at the site level as a checklist. The list is a simplified version of the audit we run in the first week when we start with a new clinic as an agency.

What YMYL is, and why the whole clinic site is in scope

The guidelines state that some topics carry a high risk of harm because content on them could significantly impact people's health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare of society, and they group these topics under four headings; health and safety is the first. Price pages, physician pages, contact forms and patient stories are in scope just as much as treatment pages, because all of them influence the treatment decision.

The second concept is E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. The guidelines say explicitly that trust is the most important member of the four, and that an untrustworthy page has low E-E-A-T no matter how experienced, expert or authoritative it may seem. The experience dimension was added at the end of 2022; Google's blog post from that time announced it as "an extra E for E-A-T". Rater scores do not directly determine ranking; but Google's helpful content document says its systems give more weight to content with strong E-E-A-T on topics that could affect health. The checklist is therefore not about pleasing a rater but about actually carrying the signals the systems look for.

List A: the site's identity and trust

• Is it clear on the first screen who operates the site: is the facility's licensed name, address, phone and e-mail reachable within one click from every page? The new promotion regulation already requires the site name to match the name on the licence.
• For a facility receiving international patients, is the health tourism authorisation certificate published on the site, and is the HealthTürkiye logo present?
• Are the last update date of pages and contact details for the site editor visible? This too is an obligation in the regulation, and at the same time the answer to the rater's "who is responsible" question.
• Do the personal data notice, the cookie notice and the consent mechanism work in every language?
• Does the about page show real people, real titles and real photographs? A non-existent team member or an invented "medical board" falls directly under the misleading page definition that is among the guidelines' reasons for the lowest rating.
• Price information is either present or its absence explained; instead of a vague "best price" phrase, a regulation-compliant price page structure is used. We described this in detail in the price pages article.

List B: content ownership, expertise and experience

• On every medical page, is the author or the medically reviewing physician named, with title and a link to their own profile page? That is exactly the "who" question of the helpful content document.
• Do physician profile pages carry verifiable information such as degree, specialty and role at the facility; is there a real record rather than social proof?
• Does the page say "how" it was produced: which sources it relies on, when it was updated, for which treatments the facility has its own hands-on experience? The experience dimension comes in here; the difference between a page describing a treatment the facility performs and a generic encyclopaedia text lies in explaining how the process runs, how the physician gives healing ranges and at which stage the patient gets information from whom.
• No outcome promises: have statements that make the result certain, promise permanence or give assurance been searched for and removed not only in the text but also in the title tag, meta description and image alt text?
• Does every treatment page carry indication, process, risks and recovery headings; is the risks section not buried under the sales copy?
• Are the frequently asked questions answered by a physician, and are the answers written in the language of information rather than sales?
• Are the sources listed at the end of the page, and do they actually open? A broken source link is a loss of a trust signal that prevents the rater from verifying.

List C: page experience, ads and reputation

• Is there a messaging bubble, a full-screen offer layer or a country selection screen that covers the content as soon as the page opens? The guidelines count elements that make the main content hard to reach as a reason for a low rating.
• Is the treatment page readable on mobile, and do forms and messaging buttons work?
• Are there third-party ads on the site; if so, are they separated from the content without mixing? Ads are rare on clinic sites, but intermediary links without a "sponsored" label raise the same question.
• What does reputation outside the site say: are Google Business Profile, independent review sites and the press consistent with the site's own narrative? The guidelines ask the rater to do off-site research; the patient reviews and E-E-A-T article explains where that signal should be carried.
• Is identity information consistent across language versions: inconsistencies such as a different name on the English page or a different address on the Arabic page break the trust signal in all four languages at once.

How to run the audit

Applying this list once is not enough; as the content team changes and new treatment pages open, the items break again. The routine we apply is this: every three months, the ten medical pages with the most traffic plus the about, contact and physician pages are selected; each page is examined through the three lists the way a rater would, looking outside the site too; findings are recorded per page and the fixes go into the next content sprint. A ranking change is not the output of this audit; the output is that on every page it is clear who is speaking on a topic that affects health, on what basis and under whose responsibility.

This audit is the first step of the SEO work we run for clinics and it comes before content production; every new treatment article added to a site with an unclear identity enlarges the same uncertainty. You can run the full audit with your own team; when you want outside support, our way of working is described on the services page.

Conclusion

YMYL is not an exception for a clinic site but the default state. What the guidelines look for is not complicated: who stands behind the site, who wrote and reviewed the content, what experience the facility really has, and what evidence is offered for the user to trust the page. These three lists are a way to measure, every three months, whether those questions are answered at the site level.

Sources

• Search Quality Rater Guidelines: General Guidelines (11 September 2025) — Google
• Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content — Google Search Central
• E-A-T gets an extra E for Experience — Google Search Central Blog (December 2022)
• Google Search Essentials — Google Search Central