information gain
A ranking concept with a Google patent lineage: a document is scored for what it adds beyond the documents the user, or the retrieval set, has already seen. It explains a pattern visible from outside, that a page restating the consensus answer loses to a page contributing a figure, a method, or a dated observation nobody else has.
What information gain does not show
The score itself is not observable from outside an engine, so it is a working explanation, not a measurement, and CrawlCheck does not claim to compute it.
Terms this definition uses
Related terms in Answer engines and retrieval
How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.
AEO · GEO · AI visibility score · share of voice · prompt set · brand mention · RAG · grounding · training data · embedding · chunking · context window · token · hallucination · refusal · AI Overview · answer engine · citation · retrieval · hallucinated attribution · Hybrid search · Re-ranking · Passage ranking · Query fan-out · Chunk boundary · BM25 · cross-encoder · AI Mode · dense retrieval
Questions about information gain
What is information gain?
A ranking concept with a Google patent lineage: a document is scored for what it adds beyond the documents the user, or the retrieval set, has already seen. It explains a pattern visible from outside, that a page restating the consensus answer loses to a page contributing a figure, a method, or a dated observation nobody else has.
What does information gain not show or guarantee?
The score itself is not observable from outside an engine, so it is a working explanation, not a measurement, and CrawlCheck does not claim to compute it.
Which area of the glossary does information gain belong to?
Answer engines and retrieval: How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.
← AI Mode · dense retrieval →
See it in the full glossary · 772 terms across 19 areas.
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