Topical Authority

Topical authority is the degree to which search engines and AI models consider your website an expert source on a particular subject area. It is built by creating comprehensive, high-quality content that thoroughly covers a topic and its subtopics, with strong internal linking between related pages.

Topical authority is increasingly important for AI citation because language models are more likely to reference sources that demonstrate deep knowledge of a subject. A website with 50 interlinked articles about project management software will be cited more often than one with a single blog post on the same topic.

Building topical authority involves developing content clusters around pillar topics, creating comprehensive pillar pages, producing supporting content that covers subtopics and related questions, implementing strategic internal linking, and consistently publishing authoritative content over time.