The Entity Salience Score is a numerical metric assigned by the Google Natural Language API to each extracted entity, quantifying its relative importance or prominence within the piece of text or query analyzed. Higher scores indicate a more central or prominent role for that entity.
Salience plays a weighting role in advanced ML models. In entity-based search intent classification, the weight of the entity is often based on its salience score, ensuring that more prominent entities have a greater influence on the final classification decision (e.g., determining if the query is Informational or Transactional).
For practical keyword universe analysis, particularly when dealing with many short queries, the raw Salience score can be less informative than desired. Therefore, for large datasets, a custom metric derived from the entity’s prevalence (counting the total number of keywords the entity appears in across the dataset) is often used instead to infer the entity’s overall importance.