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What is Centrality?

Verified 5 August 2026

PageRank-style centrality scores a node by the weighted importance of what points at it, computed iteratively. In a coverage graph it identifies passages the rest of the corpus treats as load-bearing.

It answers a different question from relevance. Relevance asks what matches the query; centrality asks what the field considers canonical. For an agent entering an unfamiliar domain the second is usually more useful — it surfaces what an expert would have read first.

Computed at build time and stored as a fast field, so filtering and sorting on it costs nothing at query time.

How unlob handles this: Coverage graph

Common questions

What is Centrality?

Centrality measures how well-connected a node is within a graph, and is used to identify the documents a field treats as foundational.

How does Centrality work in practice?

It answers a different question from relevance. Relevance asks what matches the query; centrality asks what the field considers canonical. For an agent entering an unfamiliar domain the second is usually more useful — it surfaces what an expert would have read first.

See it working

The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card — enough to test any of this against your own queries.