Information gain
Also called: information gain score, information gain seo
Information gain is the amount of new, non-redundant information a page adds beyond what already ranks for a query. It comes from a Google patent that scores documents by the additional value they provide versus pages a user has already seen, rewarding originality over repetition.
The concept traces to Google’s patent “Contextual estimation of link information gain” (granted, most recently as US12013887B2 in June 2024). It describes a machine learning model that compares semantic representations (embeddings) of a candidate page against documents a user has already viewed, then outputs a score for the “additional information that is included in the given document beyond information contained in other documents that were already presented to the user.” Redundant pages get demoted; genuinely new ones move up.
Two caveats keep this honest. Google has never confirmed it runs information gain as a live web-search ranking factor. And the patent leans toward automated assistants and chatbots rather than the ten blue links. Roger Montti points out it says “automated assistant” far more often than “search engine” (69 times versus 25), which puts AI Overviews and conversational answers in scope.
How to earn it
The practical version is simple: publish something the pages above you do not already say. Concrete moves that raise information gain:
- original research or first-party data
- a named expert’s commentary you cannot write yourself
- your own tested opinion and experience (the first “E” in E-E-A-T)
- original images, screenshots, or video
A 1,500-word page with one real data point routinely beats a 4,000-word rehash. More words is not the goal. More net-new is.
How it affects your traffic
If your pages restate the same points as everyone ranking above you, they stall no matter how long they are, because there is nothing new for Google or an AI answer engine to reward. On-page work is where information gain gets built in: map what competitors already cover, then add the data, examples, and expert input they lack. Our On-Page SEO service audits pages for redundancy and rewrites them to contribute something the SERP does not already have, which is what earns both classic rankings and AI citations.
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