Information Gain
Information gain is how much new information a page adds beyond what a reader has already seen on the same topic. In SEO, the term usually points to a Google patent granted in 2022, which describes scoring a document by the information it holds beyond what was already shown to the user.
Source: Google Patents, US11354342B2, Contextual estimation of link information gain (Google LLC, filed October 18, 2018, granted June 7, 2022), checked October 29, 2026
What Information Gain means for your business
The patent describes a system, such as an AI assistant or a search engine, that notes which documents a person has already been shown on a topic, gives the rest an information gain score, and offers the ones that add the most. A patent records what a company invented. It doesn't say Google uses the idea in ranking, and we haven't found Google saying it does.
Outside SEO, information gain is also a statistics and machine learning term for how much a split in data cuts uncertainty.
Google says the same thing in its own guides without the patent: don't just recycle what others have said, and give readers something beyond the obvious. So we'd use the idea anyway. Before writing a page, we look at what already answers the buyer's question and ask what we could add that those pages can't. It might be how you set your prices, the questions customers really ask you, local details or photos of the work. If we can't name one thing, we don't write the page.
If your pages say the same things as every competitor's, finding what you can add that they can't is where our citation-ready content work starts.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview named the 2022 patent but said Google calculates an information gain score, which the patent doesn't establish, citing SEO tool blogs, agencies and YouTube. ChatGPT said Google hasn't confirmed it as a ranking factor and cited nothing.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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