Topical authority
Topical authority is being treated as a reliable source on a whole subject because you cover it in depth, which helps you get read and cited.
Topical authority is being seen as a reliable source on a whole subject, because you cover it thoroughly and well. A site with one good article about espresso has a good article. A site that answers every question people ask about espresso, accurately and in depth, has topical authority.
Search engines have long rewarded sites that cover a subject properly. AI platforms that search the web before answering inherit a lot of that, and they also tend to come back to sources that keep answering the questions they search for.
What builds it
- Covering the questions people really ask on the subject, the small ones as well as the big ones
- Depth: real detail, first-hand experience, things other pages don't say
- Pages that link to each other, so it's clear they belong together
- Other sites citing you on the subject, which says your work is trusted outside your own site
- Keeping it all up to date
What doesn't
Breadth with no depth looks like a content farm. Twenty short posts that each restate the same advice add nothing. One brilliant post on its own can rank, but it doesn't make you the place to go for the whole subject.
An example
For example, Kestrel Roasters wants to be the source for home espresso. It writes clear guides on grind size, dose, water temperature and cleaning, adds tests of the grinders it sells, and publishes its own measurements of how fresh beans taste over time. Coffee forums start linking to the guides.
A few months later, the answers to Kestrel's espresso prompts use its pages for several different questions, and name Kestrel more often when people ask which roaster to buy from.
In AnswerOrbit
In Topics and prompts, each topic shows your visibility on that subject, so you can see whether the work is paying off. The Pages tab in Sources shows which of your pages the answers use, and the citations number shows how often your site is used at all.