Topical Authority: Three Meanings, One Name

The proposal came with a label: topical authority. The plan had one main page, twenty articles around it, and links tying everything together. The promise was that Google would start treating your site as the reference on the subject.

Before you sign, run the search yourself. On September 14, 2026, we typed “topical authority” into Google in Brazil, where we are based. Next to the results sat a knowledge panel for one person, Koray Tuğberk Gübür, described as a consultant. ¹ Across the twelve addresses that shared the first page, the definitions looked alike. Almost all of them talked about reputation on a subject. ²

The simplest thing was missing. The name travels with at least three meanings. One is written down by Google. Another came out of a leak. The third is the one the industry sells. This piece pulls the three apart and shows where each one stops.

One word, three meanings

Think of the word script. At the pharmacy, it is the prescription your doctor signs. On a movie set, it is the lines the actors say. For a programmer, it is a file of code the computer runs. Mix up the three, and you hand the pharmacist a screenplay.

Topical authority works the same way. The first meaning is a system Google announced in 2023, with a name and an address. The second is two fields in internal documentation that leaked in 2024. The third is a publishing method, with a main page, a group of pages, and links.

The three talk to one another. None of them proves the other two.

What Google documents under that name

Picture a flood in your town. The national outlets cover it. So does the local paper, which knows every flooded street. In the search results, the local paper shows up near the top.

On May 23, 2023, Google explained that effect on its official blog for developers. The flood example is Google’s own. The system has a name, and it differs from the industry’s term by two letters. This is called topic authority. ³

The post says what the system is for. It helps decide which expert sources are helpful for a newsy query, in specialized areas such as health, politics, or finance. It applies to Google Search and Google News. ³

Three signals appear among the most prominent. How notable a publication is for a topic or a place. How often other outlets cite its original reporting. And the source’s reputation, with a history of strong reporting, journalism awards, and recommendations from professional societies. ³

Look at where the last two come from. Other outlets cite, societies recommend, juries hand out awards. Neither signal comes from the publication itself. It is the same material as brand authority: what others write about you.

Where the first one ends

The 2023 post deals with news publications and news searches. It describes no system for every site. It also says nothing about a main page, a group of pages, or a number of articles. The closing advice is for publishers: keep doing the great coverage you already do, on the topics and places you know well. ³

Google’s guide to its ranking systems, updated in December 2025, has no entry under that name. It does have an entry for local news systems. ⁴

For any site, Google writes two things close to the subject, without using the name. The guide says its systems work at the page level, and that site-wide signals also count. ⁴ The page on helpful content includes a self-assessment question: “Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?” ⁵

The same page lists warning signs. One is producing lots of content on many different topics, hoping some of it performs well in search. ⁵ That is what exists officially for your site. A question about focus, and the statement that the whole site counts, with no number and no format.

What the 2024 leak showed

The second meaning has a field name. In 2024, the documentation of an internal Google API leaked. In a module with authority and topic in its name, two fields matter here. The siteFocusScore says how focused a site is on one topic. The siteRadius measures how far the pages drift from the site. ⁶

The full explanation, with the site and its pages drawn as points on a map, is in the piece on semantic silos. What matters here is the edge.

Google confirmed to the press that the documents were real. In the same email, it cautioned against assumptions drawn from out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information. ⁷

Mike King published one of the first analyses of the material. ⁷ He counted 2,596 modules and 14,014 attributes. And he wrote plainly that the weight of each attribute in the scoring functions is unknown. ⁸

Where the second one ends

The leak shows that Google kept a measure of site focus in 2024. How much it weighs, the leak does not show. Whether it is still used the same way, it does not show either. ⁷ ⁸ No public Google report displays these two numbers. ⁶

The fields say nothing about links, a main page, or a group of pages. Their descriptions deal with embeddings, the points of meaning for the site and for each page. ⁶ Anyone who ties internal links to these fields fills in the missing part on their own. The piece on internal links covers that.

In my book SEO de Entidade, published in Portuguese, I used an image for this edge. The leak is the blueprint of a system. And a blueprint is not a photograph of the building up and running. ⁹

What the industry sells under that name

The third meaning is the best known.

Picture a branch library. On the middle shelf sits the general book on gardening. Around it are smaller books on pruning, compost, and growing vegetables on a balcony. Each small book carries a note pointing to the big one, and the big one points to all of them. Online, this is called a topic cluster, with a pillar page at the center.

HubSpot describes this model on a page of its own, updated on June 17, 2026. It says the links between the pages strengthen topical authority over time. ¹⁰ The basis it cites is internal research from 2015, which the page calls the foundation of the model. The more links the team added between related pages, the higher those pages climbed. The page gives no numbers. ¹⁰

Koray Tuğberk Gübür, the consultant from the panel in that search, presents topical authority as a semantic SEO methodology. His page says he founded the concept on May 18, 2022. It also says the concept comes from Google patents and research papers. ¹¹

The oldest trace of the idea I found in a Google patent is a filing from 2004. It was signed by Amit Singhal and Urs Hoelzle. It describes a popularity calculated per topic, from visits to documents. ¹² The text never uses the word authority. And Google let the patent lapse for unpaid fees. ¹²

The tools came next. Semrush has a metric called Topical Authority, with four levels: Low, Moderate, Relevant, and High. The Semrush article that introduces the metric does not explain the calculation. ¹³ It is the tool’s number, built by the tool’s method.

The page-count question

How many pages make authority? The industry answers with numbers that fight each other.

One of the texts on the first page doubts it. A site, it says, is unlikely to become an authority with 10, 20, or even 50 pages on one topic. ¹⁴ A study published by Kevin Indig in March 2026 points to something close to the opposite. ¹⁵

The study has an author, a date, and a method, so it belongs here. Indig analyzed ChatGPT citations across seven industries. The first cut had 21,482 citation rows, 670 domains, 2,344 URLs, and 127 prompts. ¹⁵ In his conclusions, he writes that in low-concentration industries, a focused strategy of 30 to 50 pages can compete. ¹⁵

The most useful conclusion of the study is a different one. A single page covering ten or more query intents is worth more, in citation reach, than ten single-intent pages. ¹⁵ For Indig, reach is counted in distinct prompts answered. It is not counted in pages.

Where the third one ends

The study measures citation in ChatGPT, on the prompts in its sample, and does not measure position in Google. ¹⁵ The 30 to 50 pages are a recommendation from the conclusions, with no test comparing sites with and without the strategy. The comparison with domain authority is also in the conclusions, backed by the example of one page. The published method includes no such measure. ¹⁵

The original ran in Growth Memo as a paid post, which I did not read for this piece. The source here is the open version Indig himself published in Search Engine Journal. ¹⁵

Pillar pages, clusters, and links between pages are a way of organizing a site. They have an industry lineage and an internal correlation with no published number. ¹⁰ They can be good editorial work. Still, no Google document gives them the name topical authority. ³ ⁴ ⁵

What the first page says, and what it leaves out

On September 14, 2026, I read the twelve addresses on the first page for “topical authority.” Ten came from Google in Brazil and ten from Semrush’s Brazil database, with eight in common. Half of them are in Portuguese. ¹ ²

Ten of the twelve talk about pillars and clusters. Two mention the news system. One of those two finds it easy to imagine the same system running for every site. ² ¹⁴

One cites the two leaked fields. Its timeline says the leak confirmed that Google rewards sites that stay on topic. A few sections earlier, the same text admits Google never published a specification for topical authority. ¹⁶

Four things show up in none of the twelve. ²

The system’s exact name, topic authority, with news as its boundary. One text uses those two words, in a general sense.
Google’s question about the site’s primary purpose or focus.
The caveat that the leak shows what exists, and never the weight.
Indig’s citation study, with its method and its conclusion about the broad page.

Where each one ends, side by side

What gets called topical authority	Where it comes from	What it supports	Where it ends
Topic authority	Google blog, May 23, 2023 ³	A system for news searches, with three prominent signals	News publications and news searches; nothing about pillars or page counts
Site focus and radius	Documentation leaked in 2024 ⁶	Two stored fields about a site’s focus	Shows they exist, without the weight; a snapshot of 2024
Pillars, clusters, and links	HubSpot, consultants, and tools ¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹³	Editorial organization, with an internal correlation and no number	No Google document uses the name; the study read here measures citation in ChatGPT

The question for the next proposal

Take one question to the meeting: which of the three are you talking about?

If the answer is Google, ask for the address of the page. If it is the 2023 post, ask whether your site publishes news. If it is the leak, ask how much those fields weigh. The honest answer is that nobody on the outside knows. ⁸ If it is the method, ask for the study, with author, date, and what it measured.

Then do an exercise that depends on no proposal at all. Open the list of pages on your site. Next to each one, write the question it answers for the person searching. How to tell one question from another is in the piece on search intent. The rest of this section starts on the semantic SEO page.

From now on, when someone says topical authority, you will ask which of the three. And you will ask for the address of each one.

Today, take a sheet of paper. At the top, write Google’s question: “Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?” ⁵ Answer it in one sentence before you read the next proposal.

Frequently asked questions

Does Google use topical authority to rank sites?

Google documented a system called topic authority for news searches, in May 2023. ³ For any site, it writes that site-wide signals count and asks whether the site has a primary focus. ⁴ ⁵ A system under that name for every site does not appear in the Google pages read for this piece.

How many pages do I need for topical authority?

In the Google pages read for this piece, that number does not appear. ³ ⁴ ⁵ The industry’s numbers fight each other: one text doubts that even 50 pages are enough, and Indig’s study recommends 30 to 50 in low-concentration industries. ¹⁴ ¹⁵ The same study concludes that one broad page is worth more, in citation reach, than ten narrow ones. ¹⁵

Is Semrush’s Topical Authority metric the same as Google’s?

No. It is the tool’s own metric, in four levels, and the article that introduces it does not explain the calculation. ¹³ The leaked fields appear in no public Google report. ⁶

Does the leak prove that Google rewards focused sites?

It proves that Google kept a measure of site focus in 2024. ⁶ Nobody on the outside knows its weight, and Google itself cautioned against readings taken out of context. ⁷ ⁸

Notes and sources

Live reading of the Google Brazil results page for “topical authority,” September 14, 2026, at https://www.google.com.br/search?q=topical+authority&hl=pt-BR&gl=br&pws=0, in the author’s own browser tab. The search ran on Google in Brazil, where we are based, with the interface in Portuguese. No AI Overview. Next to the results, a knowledge panel for Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR, labeled “Consultor” (consultant). Organic results, in order: Conversion, Hedgehog Digital, Semrush, liveSEO, Trammit, Fresh Lab, topicalauthority.digital, Júlia do SEO, Mailchimp, and Spicy Margarita. The search for “autoridade tópica,” the Portuguese term, had Conversion first on the same day. Accessed September 14, 2026.
SEO Genome survey, September 14, 2026: the top ten organic results in Semrush, Brazil database, for “topical authority” (ahrefs.com, conversion.com.br, semrush.com, hedgehogdigital, mailchimp.com, liveseo.com.br, neilpatel.com, spicymargarita.co, topicalauthority.digital, freshlab.com.br), added to the ten in note 1, for a total of twelve addresses, all downloaded and read the same day. Six are in English and six in Portuguese. Talking about pillars and clusters: Ahrefs, Semrush, Conversion, Hedgehog, Mailchimp, liveSEO, Neil Patel, Spicy Margarita, Trammit, and Júlia do SEO. Mentioning Google’s news system: https://www.semrush.com/blog/topical-authority/ and https://www.spicymargarita.co/archive/topical-authority-seo. Citing siteFocusScore and siteRadius: https://ahrefs.com/blog/topical-authority/. None of the twelve ties the exact name “topic authority” to the news boundary (the Spicy Margarita text uses the two words twice, in a general sense, and calls the news system a “topical authority system”; the Portuguese texts do not carry “autoridade no assunto,” the name in Google’s Portuguese translation). None carries the question about a primary purpose or focus, the caveat about the weight of the leaked fields, or the Indig study in note 15. The other addresses: https://www.conversion.com.br/blog/topical-authority/, https://br.hedgehogdigital.co.uk/blog/topical-authority/, https://mailchimp.com/resources/topical-authority/, https://liveseo.com.br/seo/topical-authority/, https://neilpatel.com/blog/topical-authority/, https://www.topicalauthority.digital/, https://www.freshlab.com.br/blog/entenda-topical-authority/, https://trammit.com/topical-authority-como-construir-autoridade-e-ranquear-melhor-no-google/, and https://juliadoseo.com/o-que-e-topical-authority/. Accessed September 14, 2026.
Jen Granito, “Understanding news topic authority,” Google Search Central Blog, May 23, 2023, https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/05/understanding-news-topic-authority; Portuguese version, “Noções básicas sobre ‘autoridade no assunto’ nas notícias” (Understanding news “topic authority”), https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/05/understanding-news-topic-authority?hl=pt-br. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “Google developed a system called topic authority that helps determine which expert sources are helpful to someone’s newsy query in certain specialized topic areas, such as health, politics, or finance”; the signals “How notable a source is for a topic or location”, “Influence and original reporting”, and “Source reputation”, the last with “journalistic awards” and “recommendations from expert sources, such as professional societies”; the flood example, “say, for example, there was a flood where you lived”; and the advice “Publishers looking for success with topic authority should do exactly what their publications would normally do”. The Portuguese version names the system “autoridade no assunto” (authority on the subject).
Google Search Central, “A guide to Google Search ranking systems,” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking-systems-guide, page last updated December 10, 2025. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passage: “Our ranking systems are designed to work on the page level, using a variety of signals and systems to understand how to rank individual pages. Site-wide signals and classifiers are also used and contribute to our understanding of pages.” The page has the entry “Local news systems” and no occurrence of “topic authority” or “topical authority” (literal search in the downloaded text).
Google Search Central, “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content,” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content, page last updated December 10, 2025; Portuguese version, “Como criar conteúdo útil, confiável e que prioriza as pessoas,” updated December 18, 2025, with the same questions. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?” and “Are you producing lots of content on many different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?”
Documentation of Google’s Content Warehouse API, leaked in 2024, module QualityAuthorityTopicEmbeddingsVersionedItem, public mirror of the package google_api_content_warehouse v0.4.0, https://google-api-content-warehouse.hexdocs.pm/0.4.0/GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.QualityAuthorityTopicEmbeddingsVersionedItem.html. Accessed September 14, 2026. Attributes: siteFocusScore, “Number denoting how much a site is focused on one topic”; siteRadius, “The measure of how far page_embeddings deviate from the site_embedding”; siteEmbedding, “Compressed site/page embeddings”; pageEmbedding and versionId, with no description. No attribute deals with links. That no public Google report exposes these fields is a claim from this site’s piece on semantic silos, note 8.
Mia Sato, “Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real,” The Verge, May 29, 2024, https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmation. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passage, from spokesperson Davis Thompson: “We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information.” The same story says the material was first brought to light by Rand Fishkin and Mike King, “who each published initial analyses of the documents”.
Mike King, “Secrets from the Google Algorithm Leak: Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation and What it Means,” iPullRank, May 27, 2024, https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “There are 2,596 modules represented in the API documentation with 14,014 attributes (features)” and “We do not know how features are weighted in the various downstream scoring functions. We don’t know if everything available is being used.”
Daniel Sócrates, SEO de Entidade (published in Portuguese), 2026, chapter 8, “Autoridade é geometria” (Authority Is Geometry), section “O pino do site e o pino da página” (The Site Pin and the Page Pin): the fields exist in authenticated documentation, and what exists is “a planta de um sistema, e planta não é fotografia do prédio em funcionamento” (the blueprint of a system, and a blueprint is not a photograph of the building up and running).
Mimi An, with Leslie Ye, Matthew Barby, Anum Hussain, and Cambria Davies, “Topic clusters: The next evolution of SEO,” HubSpot, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/topic-clusters-seo, page last updated June 17, 2026. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “The internal links between them tell crawlers that the content shares a semantic relationship, which strengthens topical authority over time” and, on the 2015 research, “the more internal links they added between related pages, the higher those pages climbed in SERPs, and the more impressions they earned”, with no numbers published on the page.
Koray Tuğberk Gübür, “What is Topical Authority,” Holistic SEO, https://www.holisticseo.digital/theoretical-seo/topical-authority/, with the dates November 24, 2022 and February 11, 2021 in the header. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “Topical Authority is a semantic SEO methodology”; “The topical Authority concept was founded by Koray Tugberk GUBUR on 18 May 2022”; and “Topical Authority is a concept from Google Search Patents and Research Papers.”
Patent US 8,595,225 B1, “Systems and methods for correlating document topicality and popularity,” inventors Amit Singhal and Urs Hoelzle, assignee Google LLC, https://patents.google.com/patent/US8595225B1/en. Priority September 30, 2004, granted November 26, 2013; status read on the page: “Expired - Fee Related”, dated May 17, 2025, with the platform’s caveat that the status is an assumption. Accessed September 14, 2026. From the abstract: the system “determines a popularity value associated with the retrieved documents and correlates the popularity value with the one or more topics to determine a per-topic popularity”. The word “authority” appears only in the issuing office field, and not in the text. Calling the patent the groundwork of topical authority is the author’s reading, and the patent does not prove use today.
Sydney Go, “What is Topical Authority? (+ How to Build It),” Semrush, https://www.semrush.com/blog/topical-authority/, June 26, 2024. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passage: “There will be a rating of ‘Low,’ ‘Moderate,’ ‘Relevant,’ or ‘High’ under the ‘Topical Authority’ label.” The article does not describe the calculation. It mentions the news system: “Google uses a dedicated topical authority system to prioritize results from ‘news teams that are intimately familiar with the location and topic.’”
Spicy Margarita, “What is Topical Authority in SEO & 5 Case Studies,” https://www.spicymargarita.co/archive/topical-authority-seo, page with no visible date. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “it’s not likely that your website will be considered an authority on anything with only 10, 20, or even 50 pages on one topic” and, on the May 2023 post, “It’s not a stretch of the imagination to think that Google has the same ranking system in place for all sites.”
Kevin Indig, “The Science Of How AI Picks Its Sources,” Search Engine Journal, March 24, 2026, https://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-science-of-how-ai-picks-its-sources/570328/. Accessed September 14, 2026. The original, “The science of how AI picks its sources,” ran in Growth Memo on March 23, 2026, for paid subscribers, https://www.growth-memo.com/p/the-science-of-how-ai-picks-its-sources, and was not read; the open page shows only the title, the date, and the subtitle “I analyzed over 21K citations to understand the impact of content length, depth and focus.” Passages from the open version: “Dataset: 21,482 ChatGPT citation rows, 670 unique domains, 2,344 unique URLs, 127 unique prompts”; in the method, “~98,000 ChatGPT citation rows pulled from approximately 1.2 million ChatGPT responses”, across “7 distinct, verified verticals”; “Breadth of topic coverage matters more than domain authority. A single well-structured comparison page (learn.g2.com: 65 unique prompts, 495 citations) can still outperform the entire domain portfolio of a well-known brand”; “In low-concentration verticals like Healthcare and CRM, a focused 30-50 page strategy can realistically compete for a seat at the table”; “Citation reach (the number of distinct prompts a domain answers)”; and “A single evergreen page covering 10+ query intents is worth more in AI citation reach than 10 single-intent pages.” The published method includes no measure of domain authority.
Despina Gavoyannis, “Topical Authority: What It Is, How Google Measures It, and How to Build It,” Ahrefs, https://ahrefs.com/blog/topical-authority/, June 1, 2026, updated August 12, 2026. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “Google has never published a formal specification for topical authority” and, in the timeline, on the 2024 leak, “Internal signals, including site focus score and site radius, confirmed Google models each site’s topical identity and rewards those that stay tightly relevant to it.”

Topical Authority: Three Things With the Same Name, and Where Each One Ends