YMYL Compliance for Mortgage Brokers: ASIC Disclosures Google Wants to See

YMYL — "Your Money or Your Life" — is Google's internal label for sites whose content can affect a reader's financial wellbeing, health, or safety. Mortgage brokers are squarely in YMYL territory.

What's changed in 2025-2026 is that Google's ranking algorithm now actively rewards visible expertise and compliance signals on YMYL sites — and demotes sites that lack them. Most brokers think of ASIC disclosure as a regulatory checkbox. Google now treats it as a ranking signal too.

If your site is missing license disclosures, author credentials, or the required-pages set that finance regulators expect, you're losing local pack visibility to brokers who have those signals visible. This guide is the compliance + SEO overlap: what regulators require, why Google looks at the same things, and how to surface them so both audiences are satisfied.

Under Australian Credit Licence regulation, brokers must display their ACL number (or that of their head licensee) and their Credit Representative number on any communication that promotes credit products. In practice: every page of your website footer.

The minimum displayable disclosure: "Your Business Name Pty Ltd ABN XX XXX XXX XXX, Credit Representative #XXXXXX, authorised under Australian Credit Licence #XXXXXX held by [Aggregator Name]."

Place this in the global footer. Same wording on every page. Pages without the disclosure are ASIC-non-compliant, and Google's YMYL evaluators treat missing license info as a trust signal failure.

Mortgage broker license disclosures also influence E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) — which we treat as a weighted dimension in our website SEO audit.

Industry-body membership badges (MFAA, FBAA) are trust signals both ASIC-aligned and Google-aligned. Display them visibly: in the footer, on the about page, and on advisory blog content. Link the badges to your member profile page on the MFAA or FBAA website.

This serves two functions. First, it's a visible trust signal for consumers and Google's manual reviewers. Second, an outbound link to an authoritative third-party validator (MFAA member directory) is a small but real E-E-A-T signal that reinforces your authority.

Finance sites should have these pages, all linked from the main navigation or footer:

• Privacy Policy: APP 1.4 compliance under the Australian Privacy Act. Covers what data you collect, how it's used, third-party sharing.
• Credit Guide: Mandatory under NCCP. Includes your ACL number, services offered, fee structure, complaint process.
• Complaints / Internal Dispute Resolution: Required by ASIC. Must include AFCA escalation path.
• Terms of Service: Standard but expected. Limit of liability, dispute resolution venue.
• About: With visible team credentials, MFAA membership, years of experience.

Most broker sites have 2-3 of the five. Getting all five up scores high on YMYL evaluation and incidentally protects you on the ASIC side. Our audit checks for the full set automatically.

Every advisory blog post should have a visible author bio: name, photo, role, credentials, MFAA membership status, years of experience, link to LinkedIn. Schema this with Person + jobTitle + memberOf properties — Google reads it.

Generic "Posted by Admin" bylines are an E-E-A-T failure on YMYL content. If you publish under your firm name without surfacing the actual author, Google has no signal about who wrote the advice — and may discount the content in rankings.

For author bios on long-form content, include: full name, photo, current role, credentials (Cert IV Finance and Mortgage Broking, Diploma, MFAA), license number, years of experience, and a one-sentence bio. Schema the page with Article + author Person.

Any blog post that mentions specific interest rates, LVR ratios, fee structures, or scheme dollar amounts has a freshness expiry. If your "Best Home Loan Rates 2024" post still shows 2024 rates in May 2026, Google notes the staleness and demotes the page.

Fix: add a visible "Last reviewed: [date]" stamp at the top of rate-bearing posts. In schema, set dateModified to that date. Review and update quarterly — even just confirming the rates are still accurate counts as a refresh signal.

For deeper coverage of freshness as an AI search signal, see our AI Overview citations guide.

Five-minute manual check:

1. Visit your homepage. Scroll to the footer. Can you read your ACL/CR number? If not, fix today.
2. Search "[your business name] MFAA" — does your MFAA profile link to your site? Does your site footer link back? Both are E-E-A-T signals.
3. Check your navigation. Privacy, Credit Guide, Complaints, Terms, About — all five present and clickable?
4. Open a recent blog post. Is there an author byline with a credential? If not, fix.
5. Check the date stamps on any rate-mentioning content. Anything older than 6 months? Update or note as a fix.

If you fail more than two of the five, your site has a YMYL gap that is suppressing visibility. Our audit generates the exact YMYL fix list. For broader broker SEO, our local SEO for mortgage brokers guide covers the full playbook.