Topical authority

Some sites are where you go for a subject. Ask a search engine or an AI assistant ten different questions about it and the same site keeps coming back. That is topical authority: not ranking for one query, but being the source across a whole topic.

Where does the idea come from?

From SEO practice, built on something Google does write down. Its rater guidelines, the instructions for the people who evaluate search quality, define authoritativeness as being known as a go-to source for the topic. It is one part of E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust.

Two cautions. Raters do not rank pages; they evaluate results so Google can judge its systems. And there is no topical authority score in Google that you can read. What SEOs mean by it is the observable outcome of many signals: how completely a site covers a subject, how its pages link, and how often other sites on that subject cite it.

What does topical authority look like in AI answers?

You can see it from the outside as breadth: across how many related questions the same site keeps deciding the answer. Here is our own category. Attensira tracks 61 questions about AI search visibility, asked of ChatGPT and Perplexity daily, and for each question and engine it ranks the sources that decide the answers. We counted, for each site, the questions where it was among the top six on either engine, over the 30 days to 4 October 2026, read over the Attensira MCP. semrush.com helped decide 17 of the 61, help.openai.com 16 and developers.google.com 15.

Two kinds of authority show up. Semrush helps decide more of our questions than any other site, because it has published on most of the questions in the topic. Google's and OpenAI's documentation decide nearly as many and draw more citations, because they are the primary source for how their own systems work.

And then there is us. attensira.com helped decide 3 questions, and all three ask about Attensira by name. On the category questions a buyer asks before they know our name, we are not yet a source. Its 1,525 citations count the main domain only; with the docs and other subdomains, our own sites drew 1,588, the figure on source citation. That is the honest picture of a new company without topical authority, and it is the gap our own crew is working on.

How do you build topical authority?

• Map the topic as questions. List what buyers ask at every stage, not just the keywords with volume.
• Answer each question on its own page or section, directly, in the first lines under a heading that asks it.
• Link the pages into a clear structure: a hub, the questions under it, and links between related answers. See content clusters.
• Be the primary source where you can. Publish your own data, tests and documentation. Engines cite primary sources heavily.
• Earn mentions where the topic is discussed. Roundups, communities and the sites engines already cite on the topic.
• Keep it current. A topic hub with stale pages loses to one that is maintained.

What do people get wrong about it?

• Publishing a page for every keyword. Thin pages spread across a topic are the opposite of authority, and Google's spam policies treat scaled low-value content as a problem.
• Expecting it from one great page. One page can win one question. Authority is the pattern across many.
• Measuring it with a third-party score. Domain-level authority scores from SEO tools estimate links, not whether engines treat you as a source on a subject.
• Covering topics you have no standing in. Breadth outside your expertise dilutes the signal.

How does Attensira help build it?

Attensira tracks the questions in your topic and shows, per question and per engine, which sites the answers cite and whether you are among them. That turns topical authority from a feeling into a list: the questions where you are a source, the ones where you are absent, and the pages that decide each. The crew then does the work, a page that answers a missing question, a placement on the roundup that decides a buying question, each waiting for your approval in the default Draft mode. See competitor tracking for how rival sites are compared on the same questions.