What is Topical authority?

Topical authority is the degree to which a site is perceived — by both search ranking systems and LLM citation systems — as a deep, trustworthy source on a specific subject area, rather than a thin generalist. It is built by publishing comprehensive coverage of a topic cluster: pillar pages on the core concepts, supporting pages on every sub-topic, glossaries for terminology, comparison pages for adjacent options, FAQ blocks for buyer questions, and case studies for proof. Topical authority compounds: each new page in the cluster lifts the rankings of every other page in it, because the site's overall topical signals grow. The same dynamic drives AI citation — LLMs prefer to cite a single site multiple times on a topic they identify it as authoritative on, rather than spreading citations across many thin sources. Topical authority is the strategic frame behind 'should we write one big article or ten focused ones' — almost always the answer is ten focused ones, internally linked, because that's what builds the cluster.