Information gain
Information gain describes how much a page adds beyond what the pages already ranking say. Google holds a patent, granted in 2022, describing the scoring of documents by the new information they contribute in a session. It is not a confirmed ranking signal and no tool can measure it.
By Théophile Louvart, founder of Porteur · Updated 15 September 2026 · Markdown
What is documented and what is not
| Claim | Status |
|---|---|
| Google holds a patent describing information gain scoring | Documented, granted 2022 |
| Google asks whether a page adds value beyond the obvious | Documented, in the helpful content guidance |
| Information gain is a live ranking signal with a weight | Not confirmed by Google |
| A tool can score your page’s information gain | No. Any score sold as this is the tool’s own model |
A patent shows what an engineer considered worth protecting, not what runs in production. Treat the idea as a writing discipline rather than a metric.
The practical reading
A page that repeats the top ten results has nothing to earn: the reader already had that answer, one result higher. A page with something of its own has a reason to exist.
- Your own data: a figure from your product, aggregated and anonymised, that nobody else can publish.
- A worked example: the same advice applied to one real case, with the before and the after.
- A method: the order you do something in, and why that order.
- A tool: the thing the other pages describe, made runnable.
- A first-hand account: what happened when you did it, including what failed.
How to use it before writing
Read the top five results
Write down what every one of them says. That is the baseline, and repeating it earns nothing.
Name what you will add
One sentence, before you write: the data, the example, the method or the tool this page will carry that the others do not.
Put it near the top
The thing that is yours should be visible in the first screen, not buried under a definition everyone has already read.
Drop the page if there is nothing
A page with no answer to step two is a page that will sit on the third results page forever. Write a different one.
Questions
Not confirmed. Google holds a 2022 patent describing the idea and its helpful content guidance asks what a page adds beyond the obvious, but no weight or signal has been published.
No. Any tool selling a score is scoring with its own model. The usable test is manual: list what the top results say, then name what your page adds.
Your own data, a worked example with real figures, a method nobody wrote down, a tool, or a first-hand account of doing the thing, including the parts that failed.
No. Length is not gain. A short page with one figure nobody else has adds more than three thousand words restating the first page of results.
It is the same test from the other side. Google’s policy targets pages produced at scale without value of their own; a page that passes the information gain test has value of its own by definition.
Check my site, free
The free check reads the pages that rank on your searches and names what yours would have to add, in about thirty seconds.
- Free check, no card
- Read-only, your own accounts
- Readable by your agent