Information Gain: The Missing Metric in GEO Content

As marketers now in the age of AI, we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Producing content the manual way, even though it delivers high quality, really is too slow and not competitive enough, so we can't continue on with 100% manual processes here.

And if we lean too heavily on AI to generate content, then it gets kind of risky.

We don't wanna scale pure AI content, and we've all heard the warnings about AI content getting flagged or getting fingerprinted with synth ID, perhaps getting penalized, so we don't want to over-index on generic AI content.

We've gotta squeeze in the middle somehow.

We've gotta find this sweet spot, middle ground.

And we know that AI is content enough to feed on the trough of AI slop, which is mostly public information that they find on the web, and this is the large majority of AI-generated or even AI-assisted content that is feeding AI engines right now.

But really what AI prefers are truffles.

AI, first and foremost, is a truffle hunter, and truffles are original, useful knowledge that only your brand possesses that most likely hasn't surfaced yet on the web, so it hasn't been discovered, and it's buried deep inside of your company.

And our goal is to unearth those truffles and make them available for AI so that they can then reward us with greater visibility.

And that brings us to the concept of information gain, which is how much new useful information a passage adds beyond existing content that's already been covered.

So you can imagine the vast body of information that's already out on the internet, that's already been crawled and ingested and baked into AI's training data sets.

And then you have your content, which hasn't surfaced yet, and it contains new and useful evidence about what makes your brand unique.

And the degree to which you are willing to share that new useful evidence, that information gain with AI, that area that is overlapping, that shared area there is called information gain.

And the term specifically means that AI is gaining new knowledge through your sharing of your proprietary brand data.