A pre-publication fact-check pass for a single YMYL health page

A pre-publication fact-check pass for a single YMYL health page

The question: before a health article ships, what is the minimum verification sequence that a quality rater would expect to have happened behind the scenes?

Reverse-engineer it from how raters are told to judge. Per the QRG, your-money-or-your-life pages get the strictest treatment, and "medical information should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise." The pre-publication pass:

— Pull every factual claim into a list. Each one needs a source line.
— For each claim, locate a primary source: a peer-reviewed study, a guideline body (a national health service, a recognized clinical society), or a government health agency. A secondary article citing a study is not the source; the study is.
— Flag any claim that rests on a single study or a preprint. Single-study claims are the most common silent error.
— Check the source date. Superseded guidelines are a trust failure even when the prose is fluent.
— Verify that the named reviewer holds a credential matching the claim's domain, and that the credential is verifiable off-site.
— Date-stamp the review with the reviewer's name on the page.

Caveat: this pass raises accuracy and reviewability; it does not, by itself, establish the site-level reputation the QRG also weighs. A correct page on a domain with no recognized medical standing still rates lower than the same page on an established medical site. Fact-checking is necessary, not sufficient.

What we still don't know: how much weight the systems place on a named medical reviewer versus the domain's overall reputation when the two diverge — a correct page on an unknown site versus a sloppier page on a famous one.