Cornerstone content
Cornerstone content is the small set of pages on your site that matter most to your business, the ones you most want people and search to find.
Cornerstone content is the handful of pages on your site that matter most: the ones that explain what you do best, that you most want to rank, and that you'd send a new customer to first. Everything else on the site supports them, links to them, and goes into detail they don't have room for.
Choosing them is a useful discipline. Deciding which few pages are your cornerstones tells you where to spend your time, which pages to keep up to date, and where your internal links should point.
What makes a page a cornerstone
A cornerstone page covers a subject central to your business in full. It's usually long, kept current, and written for someone new to the subject. Product pages and news posts rarely qualify. Think of the page you'd want someone to read before they buy.
Most sites need only a few. If everything is a cornerstone, nothing is.
Cornerstone content vs pillar pages
The ideas are close. A pillar page is a way of structuring one topic: a broad page with shorter pages hanging off it. Cornerstone content is a way of prioritising your whole site: picking the few pages that matter most. Your cornerstones are often your pillar pages, but the label is about importance, while pillar describes structure.
How to look after them
Link to your cornerstones from every related page, using words that describe them. Update them whenever something changes, and show the date. Check them against the questions customers actually ask.
For example, Harrow & Pine picks three cornerstones: a guide to choosing a solid wood dining table, a guide to caring for oak furniture, and a page explaining how its tables are made. Its 60 blog posts each link to whichever of the three fits, and each cornerstone is reviewed every quarter.
Cornerstones and AI answers
When AI platforms answer questions about your category, they look for pages that cover the subject clearly and state facts they can use. A well-kept cornerstone page is often the page on your site most likely to be read and cited. If it's out of date, it's also the one most likely to spread old facts about you.
In AnswerOrbit
Page checks in Recommendations test one of your pages against a prompt, including whether it shows a date and opens with an answer, and compare it with up to five pages the platforms cite for that prompt. See Recommendations.