A checklist for engineering information gain into a 'me too' article

A checklist for engineering information gain into a 'me too' article

Information gain is the extra value a document adds beyond what's already indexed — Google holds a patent describing scoring documents on it. Here's a concrete way to manufacture it.

— Step 1: collect the top 10 ranking pages and list every claim, number, and subheading they share. This is the 'consensus set'.
— Step 2: write your draft covering the consensus set first — you need parity before you add gain.
— Step 3: now add at least three things none of the ten contain: an original dataset, a primary quote, a counter-example, or a calculation.
— Step 4: front-load one gain element above the fold so it's visible to both readers and snippet extraction.
— Step 5: verify each gain element is independently citable — a sentence an AI could quote without the surrounding paragraph.

Method note: derived from Google's information-gain patent (US 2022) plus manual teardown of 10-result sets across 8 queries.

Caveat: a patent existing does not confirm it ships in production; treat this as a well-motivated heuristic, not a confirmed ranking factor.

Confidence: low