The consensus information gain axis, and what does it means for AI Search SEO

AI search visibility is governed by two independent forces: Consensus (the degree to which authoritative sources agree — functioning as a trust gate) and Information Gain (the degree to which content reduces uncertainty — functioning as the citation trigger). Optimizing for one while ignoring the other lands you in one of two traps: the Consensus Trap, where redundant content gets absorbed into AI synthesis without attribution, or the Contrarian Trap, where novel but uncorroborated claims get filtered as hallucinations.
The optimal position — high consensus, high information gain — requires establishing trust by demonstrating mastery of existing literature, then providing the differentiation that justifies the citation. This deck maps the mathematical forces behind that dynamic, covering Shannon Entropy, KL Divergence, Google Patent US11354342B2, and engine-specific citation behaviors across Google, Perplexity, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

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