Topical authority: The idea that a site which covers a subject thoroughly, with well-connected pages, is treated as a better source on it. A useful way to plan content, though not a single score any search engine publishes.
What Google has actually said
The phrase is used far more by SEO writers than by Google. The clearest public reference is a 2023 Search Central post on news topic authority, describing a system that helps identify expert sources for news queries in specialised areas such as health, politics or finance. It is about news publications, and it does not describe a general topical score for every site. When people talk about topical authority for a cooking blog or a software help centre, they are describing a theory of how ranking works, not a documented Google feature.
Why the idea is still useful
Read loosely, the idea is sensible: a site that covers a subject thoroughly, accurately and in a connected way tends to be more useful than one with a single thin post on it. A woodworking site with forty well-linked posts on joinery is a better destination for a joinery question than a lifestyle blog with one, and both readers and links tend to follow that. As a planning tool it pushes you to:
- cover a topic’s obvious subquestions instead of publishing one-offs;
- connect those posts in a topic cluster around a pillar page;
- stay focused rather than chasing every unrelated trending keyword.
What to be wary of
Tools that sell a “topical authority score” are measuring their own model, not anything Google publishes. Publishing dozens of near-identical posts to “build authority” tends to produce cannibalization and thin content instead. Judge the work by things you can measure: are the posts linked to each other, do they rank for the queries you wrote them for, and do readers move from one to the next? Our guide on organising a topic into clusters covers the structure that makes those things go right.