What is Google's Medic Update?
Google’s Medic Update is the community nickname for the broad core algorithm update Google released on August 1, 2018. It hit health, finance, and other “Your Money or Your Life” sites hardest, which earned it the nickname. It also pushed E-A-T to the center of how SEOs judge content quality.
More About Google's Medic Update
Google never called it Medic. The company confirmed only that a broad core algorithm update had rolled out, one of several that year, and said it singled out no industry. As the diagram above shows, the nickname came from the SEO community instead.
Why is it called the Medic Update?
Barry Schwartz, the Search Engine Roundtable editor, coined the name. He tracked the update’s fallout, and his survey of affected sites found that roughly 42 percent were in the health and medical space. Diet advice, supplements, medical information, and alternative-medicine sites saw some of the sharpest drops.
What did the Medic Update change?
Medic raised the bar for pages that can affect a reader’s health, money, or safety. Google calls these Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages. After Medic, ranking well in those spaces meant showing real expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, shortened to E-A-T. In practice that meant credentialed authors, accurate sources, and a visible site reputation. Anonymous content that simply read well started losing ground to content with clear expertise behind it.
What does the Medic Update mean today?
The Medic Update’s lessons outlived the update itself. Google added a fourth letter to E-A-T in late 2022, making it E-E-A-T with “Experience.” YMYL is now standard SEO vocabulary. Google’s 2018 message, that the only fix is better content, remains its advice for every core update since. You can’t recover from Medic specifically anymore. Years of updates have passed, and today’s rankings reflect all of them.
Frequently Asked Questions
When exactly was the Medic Update?
It started rolling out on August 1, 2018, and broad core updates typically take one to two weeks to finish. Google confirmed this one the same day it began, which drew extra attention.
Did the Medic Update only hit health sites?
No. The name focuses on health because those sites were hit hardest, but finance, ecommerce, and other Your Money or Your Life niches took losses too. The update was industry-wide; "Medic" just reflects where the damage clustered.
What does YMYL mean?
It stands for "Your Money or Your Life," Google's label for pages that could affect someone's health, money, safety, or major life decisions. Its raters judge these pages against the strictest quality standards, so a broad core update like Medic moves their rankings more than most.
Was the Medic Update about E-A-T?
Not officially. Google framed it purely as a core update. Days earlier, though, it had updated its quality rater guidelines to stress author expertise and site trust. SEOs connected the two, and the association stuck.
