The Single-Owner Discount is an architectural hypothesis by Lee Sharks about generative search.
The hypothesis begins from a difference between retrieval and composition. A page may rank well in ordinary search while being absent from the documents used in a generated answer. The paper proposes that one reason may be provenance concentration: many documents from one inferred owner can count as a single support cluster, while the same claim distributed across institutions and authors appears independently corroborated.
This structure would advantage organizations whose output is automatically pluralized across departments, journals, news coverage, and affiliated authors. Independent archives could remain compositionally weak despite depth and internal coherence.
The paper does not claim access to Google’s production system. Patents establish relevant architectural possibilities, not the deployed mechanism. The hypothesis is intended for testing through query panels, provenance-concentration measures, generated-source inclusion, and comparisons among platforms.