What gets cited most in health, finance, and YMYL in AI Overviews: A sector-by-sector analysis

For Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) queries, the topics like Healthcare, News, or Finances that could impact a users well-being or safety, Google applies stricter standards before surfacing content in AI-generated summaries. That extra scrutiny means YMYL content behaves differently in AI Overviews (AIO, formerly the Search Generative Experience, or SGE) compared to other categories.

In some industries, AI Overviews appear for nearly half of all queries, but in YMYL sectors, they may not appear at all. When they do, Google doesn’t simply cite top-ranking pages; it prioritizes highly trusted, authoritative sources.

This guide breaks down how Google applies AI Overviews across the biggest YMYL sectors, including Health, Finance, and Legal. We review both what’s changed over the past year and which types of sources are earning citations so that you can refine your GEO strategy.

What is YMYL content?

YMYL subjects significantly affect a user’s life and wellness. Searches surrounding these topics could contain misinformation that could cause actual harm.

Examples of YMYL topics and their subtopics include:

• Financial security: Advice on investments, taxes, retirement planning, banking, loans, and overall financial security
• Health and wellness: Information on illnesses, treatments, medical advice, pharmaceuticals, pandemics, or mental health
• Physical safety: Emergency procedures, hazardous materials handling, food safety, injury prevention
• Online safety: Cybersecurity threats, privacy settings, scam identification, data protection
• Groups of people: Information regarding race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or nationality that could lead to discrimination
• Legal, Civic and Government: Legal advice, immigration, government services, elections, and public safety issues
• Major life decisions: High-stakes advice on topics like education, career, and housing
• Shopping and commerce: Information about products or services, particularly regarding research, purchase decisions, and transactions

To keep searchers safe, Google applies extra scrutiny before citing websites for these topics. In its documentation, Google is explicit that AIO has a “higher bar for showing supporting information from reliable and trustworthy sources” for YMYL queries:

“For “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) queries — where information quality is critically important — we have an even higher bar for showing supporting information from reliable and trustworthy sources. In addition, for many such queries, AI Overviews will inform people when it’s important to seek out expert advice or to verify the information presented.”

It’s reassuring that Google is cautious with YMYL categories. It means a poorly sourced article is less likely to rank above a doctor’s or financial advisor’s guidance when someone is making an important decision; it makes search safer and ensures that people access safe information. 

Here are some ways (from the documentation) about how Google applies security within AIO:

• Safety guardrails: Google’s core safety systems, including SafeSearch, are built into AI Overviews to prevent harmful, explicit, hateful, or shocking content from surfacing.
• Spam prevention: Google’s anti-spam systems, including its AI-based SpamBrain technology, are applied specifically to AI Overviews to filter out low-quality sources, a critical consideration in YMYL verticals where authoritative sourcing matters most.
• Selective triggering: AI Overviews are designed to only appear when Google has “high confidence in the quality of the responses.” For sensitive, explicit, or dangerous topics, many of which fall under YMYL, the system is built to suppress them entirely.
• Avoiding data voids: Where high-quality information is scarce, Google limits AI Overviews from appearing rather than risk surfacing misleading or low-quality content. 

Which YMYL industries have had the most AIO growth recently?

According to BrightEdge’s research, AIO presence has grown by 58% in one year.

Still, traditional SEO (just about) maintains the majority of search because 52% of queries still don’t include an AI Overview.

BrightEdge’s research includes some interesting findings about YMYL industries and where these citations came from (it’s not always top-ranking pages). 

According to the research, YMYL content — like healthcare, insurance, and education — all have significant alignment between what ranks in Google and what’s displayed in AI-generated responses. 

Compared to transactional sectors, the results are quite striking.

Just look at the following table that compares healthcare with ecommerce. Nearly 80% of AI overviews take sources that are also ranking for healthcare, whereas in ecommerce it’s just over 20%. 

BrightEdge reviewed the top-10 overlap. The top-10 overlap refers to the percentage of sources cited within an AI Overview that also rank in the organic top 10 results for the same query. 

In other words, BrightEdge measured how often Google is pulling AIO citations from the same pages that are already winning on page one. A high overlap means AIO citations and organic rankings are closely aligned. A low overlap, like Finance’s 11.3%, means Google is largely citing different sources in its AI Overview than the ones ranking on page one of the organic search results.

Here’s a table, filtered by the biggest top-10 change. The table shows the difference between pages ranking in the top ten and also cited in AI Overview last year compared to this year. The data is filtered by the change column.

YMYL topics can be found within many industries, but very obvious YMYL categories such as finance, insurance, and healthcare have experienced the least amount of change with top-ranking pages and citations overlapping.

It’s hard to draw conclusions about what this means for YMYL, but perhaps:

• Stability in YMYL suggests that Google has established a trusted source pool for YMYL topics and has stuck with it.
• Non-YMYL verticals are used for testing. Entertainment, travel, and ecommerce all contain YMYL topics like which countries are safe to travel to, for example, but entertainment (which moved the most significantly) is arguably the least YMYL topic of all. It has the most dramatic swings in overlap, so perhaps Google uses topics such as this for testing or recalibrating who gets cited. 

The takeaway for marketers working in YMYL niches? Don’t expect the same dramatic shifts you might be seeing in industries like entertainment. As the data shows, YMYL verticals like healthcare, finance, and insurance have seen the smallest year-over-year changes in both overlap metrics. Incremental gains are the norm in YMYL search.

Beyond page-one overlap, BrightEdge’s research goes a step further by tracking how many AIO citations come from sources that don’t rank anywhere in the top 100 organic results. 

Year over year, and in every industry, AIOs are gradually pulling from more organically ranking content, but in several key YMYL verticals, the changes are less significant. 

To quote BrightEdge’s findings:

“AIOs are becoming more connected to organically-ranking content across the board. But in verticals like finance (66%), ecommerce (62%), and restaurants (76%), the majority of AIO citations still come from sources that don’t rank anywhere in the top 100 organic results.”

Health and medical

According to an in-depth analysis by Semrush, 16.04% of health keywords triggered an AI Overview as of November 2025, making health one of the industries most affected in addition to science, computers & electronics, and people & society. 

Neil Patel’s data puts the share of health searches with an AI Overview at 60.7% in January 2025, but this data is neither as new as Semrush’s, nor BrightEdge’s. 

Semrush recorded a 9.58% decrease in health AIO presence between March and November 2025, a reminder that Google recalibrates even in well-established YMYL categories.

BrightEdge’s 18-month tracking gives the clearest picture of how this has evolved by researching three query types (conditions and symptoms, general education, and local):

Condition and symptom queries launched at 82% AIO coverage in May 2024 and have since reached near-saturation at 93%. 

Here’s an example of an AIO at the top of a Google SERP for a symptom query:

Google clearly sees these as exactly the kind of searches where AI synthesis adds value. 

General education queries followed a similar path, climbing steadily from 50% to 74% over the same period. Here’s an example of a general education query related to health:

Local queries tell a different story. Coverage tested at 14% in May 2025 before pulling back to 7% by September, then settling at 11% by December. Google appears to be actively experimenting with “near me” style health queries. 

Here’s an example of a local query:

What this means for health publishers: Condition and symptom searches nearly always display an AI Overview, so, if you’re a content creator producing this type of content, you must track AI metrics like visibility, brand mentions, and citations to gauge content success. Local health content is currently somewhat unpredictable, perhaps in a testing phase, but it seems unlikely that this content will dominate an AIO as the map pack (that displays directly below) seems more useful, as local searches are navigational. 

Banking and finance

Finance looks very different from Healthcare on the surface.

Semrush data shows just 7.78% of finance-related keywords triggered an AI Overview as of November 2025, with only a 0.81% increase recorded between March and November 2025. Neil Patel’s figures put the broader share of Finance searches with an AI Overview at 22.9% as of January 2025. 

Compared to healthcare’s numbers, finance appears to lag significantly. This finding aligns with the BrightEdge research, too.

There may be a rationale for this finding: Finance search is dominated by real-time queries, such as stock tickers, live market prices, and trading data. These are searches where real-time accuracy matters, and, therefore, Google deliberately keeps AI Overviews out of them. 

BrightEdge’s research breaks this down clearly:

• Stock tickers and real-time prices (e.g. “AAPL stock price” or NASDAQ” have 8% AI Overviews
• Educational queries (e.g., “what is an IRA,” “how do bonds work”): 67% have AI Overviews
• Trading queries (e.g. “premarket futures,” “stock market today” 44% have AI Overviews
• Tools and calculator queries (e.g. “mortgage calculator,” “401k calculator) 11% have AI Overviews

Here’s what BrightEdge resolved:

“Google draws clear lines in Finance. AI Overview treatment depends entirely on query type: educational queries like “what is an IRA” hit 91% coverage — nearly identical to Healthcare. But real-time price queries like stock tickers sit at just 7%. And just like Healthcare, Google pulled back from local “near me” queries entirely. Same YMYL principles, adapted to different search behaviors.”

Here are the finance categories driving the fastest growth:

What this means for finance publishers:  If your content covers educational, planning, or explainer topics, you’re operating in a segment that’s rapidly approaching full AI Overview saturation. If your focus is stock-related or real-time data, traditional SEO remains the primary channel. With the current unreliability of AI, it feels likely that real-time data will rely on traditional SEO for some time.

Government and Legal

Semrush data shows 12.42% of law and government keywords triggered an AI Overview as of November 2025, with a 4.78% decrease recorded between March and November 2025. 

Neil Patel’s figures put the broader share of legal searches with an AI Overview at 21.5% as of January 2025, broadly in line with finance, and well below healthcare.

That decrease is worth paying attention to. Unlike finance, which saw modest growth over the same period, the legal and government AIO presence actually contracted. 

The pattern seen in healthcare and finance repeats here: Google is broadly comfortable with AI Overviews on educational and explanatory queries, but significantly more cautious around anything requiring real-time accuracy or nuanced expert judgment.

General explainer queries, such as “how does the appeals process work,” are the kind of search where AI synthesis adds genuine value for users.

Here’s what the AI Overview looks like for that query:

Election-related queries are also explicitly restricted from triggering AI overviews. In the documentation, Google says, “Out of an abundance of caution.”

What this means for legal and government publishers: The contraction in AIO presence suggests Google is actively refining which legal queries it considers safe to summarize. Publishers who focus on clear, educational content, explaining legal concepts, outlining processes, and breaking down rights are better positioned than those producing content that edges toward specific or timely legal advice.

What this means for your YMYL strategy

Earning a place in AI Overviews for YMYL topics requires a range of AI search optimization strategies, here’s where to start.

• Don’t rely on page-one rankings alone. Only about 17% of AIO citations come from organic top-10 results. Ranking well is important but it doesn’t guarantee AIO inclusion. Treat AIO visibility as a separate objective that requires its own attention.
• Understand how your industry behaves. Healthcare, finance, and legal follow slightly different patterns. Before building a strategy, establish your baseline. Find out how often AI Overviews appear for your target keywords, and what types of sources are being cited?
• Prioritize educational and explainer content. Across every YMYL vertical, the query types seeing the highest and fastest-growing AIO coverage are educational ones. Clear, well-structured content that explains complex topics is where Google is most comfortable deploying AI summaries.
• Don’t expect overnight results. As the overlap data shows, YMYL verticals move slower than others. Google’s trusted source pool in these spaces is more established. Incremental, consistent progress is the realistic expectation.
• Track both organic and AIO visibility separately. The two experiences are connected but not the same. Monitoring only traditional rankings will leave you blind to what’s actually happening in AI results for your keywords.
• Build for trustworthiness, not just traffic. In YMYL categories, Google is explicitly looking for credible, authoritative sources. That means demonstrable expertise and accurate information, the pillars of Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines.

Your next step: Measure your AIO visibility

AI Overviews are reshaping visibility, though admittedly not as fast as YMYL compared to other industries. Yet it’s still a crucial part of the future. For now, Google deploys AIO selectively, favoring certain query types over others: In healthcare, for instance, condition and symptom searches are far more likely to trigger an AIO. This reflects Google’s caution, but it likely won’t stay like this forever. 

YMYL marketers must stay ahead of AIO and AI search.

Semrush One lets you track your AI Overview and AI Mode visibility alongside your organic rankings, so you can see exactly how your YMYL content is performing in both experiences and where the opportunities are.

Try Semrush One to find out if Google is citing you in AI Overviews for your most important YMYL keywords.