Because options list on more than a dozen venues, a large order can be routed to hit every displayed quote at the same moment. The trader pays up for immediacy and accepts a worse average price than a resting order would achieve.
Urgency is genuinely informative in a narrow sense: someone wanted it now. What they wanted it for is not visible, and sweeps are used as often to close a position or hedge a stock trade as to open a speculative bet.
Example: 3,000 XYZ $55 calls fill across six exchanges within 200 milliseconds, all at or above the ask, average $0.86 against an $0.80 quote. Someone paid six cents of urgency premium per contract — $18,000 of impatience.
Related: options-flow, unusual-options-activity, nbbo, options-block-trade