Rule Details

Sensitive content — medical advice, financial guidance, legal information, affiliate recommendations — requires clear disclaimers. Google's Quality Rater Guidelines (opens in new tab) and page-level YMYL detection both treat these disclaimers as trust signals, not just legal boilerplate.

Code Examples

❌ Avoid — sensitive content with no disclaimer

<article>
  <h1>How to Lower Blood Pressure Naturally</h1>
  <p>Reducing sodium intake to under 1,500mg per day can significantly
     lower systolic blood pressure...</p>
  <!-- No medical disclaimer anywhere on the page -->
</article>

✅ Correct — prominent disclaimer before sensitive content

<article>
  <aside class="disclaimer" role="note">
    <strong>Medical Disclaimer:</strong> This content is for informational
    purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a
    qualified healthcare professional before making health-related decisions.
  </aside>
 
  <h1>How to Lower Blood Pressure Naturally</h1>
  <p>Reducing sodium intake to under 1,500mg per day can significantly
     lower systolic blood pressure...</p>
</article>

✅ Affiliate disclosure before first affiliate link

<article>
  <p class="affiliate-disclosure">
    <em>Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase
    through these links, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
    <a href="/affiliate-policy">Read our full affiliate policy.</a></em>
  </p>
 
  <h1>Best Project Management Tools in 2024</h1>
  <p>We recommend <a href="https://example.com/?ref=affiliate">ToolName</a>
     for its ease of use...</p>
</article>

Why It Matters

• E-E-A-T Trustworthiness: Google's quality raters mark pages without appropriate disclaimers as untrustworthy, which suppresses rankings for YMYL topics.
• Legal compliance: FTC rules (US), ASA guidelines (UK), and GDPR (EU) require specific disclosures for affiliate content, advertising, and data collection, which is why FTC disclosure guidance (opens in new tab) should inform affiliate and sponsored pages.
• User trust: Readers make better decisions when they understand the nature of the content they are reading.

Content Types Requiring Disclaimers

Placement Guidelines

• Place disclaimers before the relevant content — not in footers after users have already read the advice.
• Use a visually distinct style (box, background colour, italic) so disclaimers are not missed.
• Link to a fuller policy page when a brief inline disclaimer is insufficient.
• Do not bury disclaimers in 8pt font or collapse them behind a "Read more" toggle.

Exceptions

• Necessary utility or compliance pages can be intentionally brief and should not be judged by the same editorial-depth expectations as ranking-focused content.
• AI-assisted drafting is not a failure by itself; flag unsupported claims, missing editorial review, or low-originality output instead.
• When a page has both trust-signal issues and crawl/index problems, make the page eligible to rank first and then improve the content quality signals.

Standards

• Use these references as the standard for the final search-facing HTML, metadata, and crawl behavior.
• Check the implementation against Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines before treating the rule as satisfied.
• Check the implementation against FTC: .com Disclosures — How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising before treating the rule as satisfied.

Verification

Automated Checks

• Inspect rendered HTML and HTTP headers to confirm the expected metadata or crawlability signal is present.
• Test the affected URL with Google Search Console or equivalent tooling where relevant.
• Re-crawl a representative page set after deployment.

Manual Checks

• Confirm the change does not create conflicting canonical-url, robots, or structured-data signals.