Definition
Topical authority is the degree to which a website is seen by search engines and AI engines as a reliable, complete source on one subject. A site with topical authority on 'solar panels' does not only answer the main question but also the sub-questions about yield, subsidies, installation, maintenance and payback time, and connects those pages logically.
The concept sits opposite domain authority, which is mostly about links and age. Topical authority is about coverage and depth. Google has repeatedly shown in patents and documentation that it evaluates pages within the context of the whole site: a page about mortgage rates on a site that is only about mortgages has an edge over the same page on a general news site. Language models amplify that effect, because during retrieval they pick sources that demonstrably master the subject.
You build topical authority with a topical map: an overview of all questions, entities and sub-topics that belong to your core subject, grouped into clusters with a pillar page per cluster. Each cluster covers one search intent completely. The pages link to each other with descriptive anchor text, so search engines can follow the structure and understand the relationship between the pages.
Completeness comes before volume. Fifty pages that each answer a genuinely different question build more authority than two hundred variations on the same title. Thin or overlapping pages weaken the signal. The quality of each page matters as well: a direct answer, your own data or experience, current information and an author who visibly knows the subject.
The effect of topical authority often shows only after a few months, but it is durable: new pages within a well-covered topic rank faster, and AI engines start using the domain as a standing reference. Traze builds the topical map automatically from search and AI questions and fills the gaps in order of impact, so coverage grows deliberately rather than randomly.