This is the only tool in the set that judges a site rather than a page, and it asks the question competitive content strategy actually turns on: is there depth behind the article, or is the article on its own? A single good page about a subject is normal. A set of pages covering its parts, linked to each other, is what a search engine reads as coverage — and the difference is visible without any external data at all.
Here is where that sits. The median is 42/100, which ranks it 18 of the 25 measures in this dataset. The middle half of results falls between 17 and 56 — a band 39 points wide. That is wide: sites genuinely diverge here, which is to say getting ahead is still possible.
How the scores are distributed
An average on its own misleads. The chart below splits all 1,414 scans into five score bands, totalling 100%. The spread is wide and fairly even, which is what a measure looks like while it is still being adopted unevenly.
- 0–19
- 20–39
- 40–59
- 60–79
- 80–100
| Score band | Topical Authority |
|---|---|
| 0–19 | 29% · 416 |
| 20–39 | 16% · 230 |
| 40–59 | 38% · 540 |
| 60–79 | 10% · 136 |
| 80–100 | 7% · 92 |
| Total runs | 1,414 |
The grade mix
The same data as letters: A+ 95–100, A 85–94, B 75–84, C 65–74, D 50–64 and F below 50.
Where your score stands
Read this as breadth times connection. Publishing ten related articles that never link to one another scores poorly and deserves to: to a crawler they are ten unrelated pages that happen to share a site. The score rises when the subject appears in the site's own structure — in titles, in headings, in the links between pages.
| Tool | 10th | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th | Mean | Lowest | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Topical Authority | 17 | 17 | 42 | 56 | 67 | 41.2 | 0 | 100 |
How to read it: 17 is bottom-quartile, 42 is a typical page, 56 starts the upper quartile and 67 or above is the top 10%. These thresholds apply to this tool only.
The checks that fail most
The checks come in two halves. Coverage: are the subtopics of the subject present on the site at all, and does the homepage title reflect what the site is about. Connection: do the pages link to each other in a way that makes the cluster legible, or does every page stand alone and rely on the reader arriving by search.
| Check | Did not pass | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Covers the topic’s subtopics | 91% | Hard fail |
| Structured data present | 56% | Partial |
| Topic reinforced in headings | 54% | Partial |
| Topic present in the homepage title | 44% | Partial |
| Enough supporting pages | 37% | Partial |
| Internal linking depth | 31% | Partial |
“Hard fail” means the check’s full weighting is lost; “partial” means only part of the score is. Rates are the share of scans in which the check ran and did not pass.
The weakest areas
This tool groups its checks into categories. The chart below shows how often each category was the lowest-scoring one in a scan — which area is most often the weak link. It is not the average score in that category; it is how often it came last.
“Topic Breadth” was the weakest area in 84% of scans.
What to fix first
Interlink what you already have before writing anything new. Most sites with a coverage problem do not lack the pages — they lack the links between them, so a body of work that took a year to produce reads as scattered. An afternoon of adding contextual links between related articles usually moves this score more than a new article would.
A typical scan passes 2.9 of 6 checks and leaves 3.1 open items behind. What drags a score down is usually not one catastrophe but accumulated small omissions.
Run the Topical Authority Map on your own page
Month by month
The figures on this page are replaced at every refresh. At the end of each month a permanent edition is published for that month and never edited again — which is the only reason this series can be compared at all. One edition has been published so far; when the second lands this section will set the two months side by side.
| Edition | Median | vs. previous | Scored 80+ | Issues/run | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2026 | 42 | baseline | 7% | 3.1 | 1,414 |
Frequently asked questions
What is topical authority?
It is the observation that search engines appear to favour sites showing sustained, connected coverage of a subject over sites with one strong page and nothing around it. It is not a metric Google publishes; it is a pattern in what ranks. This tool measures the structural half of it — breadth and interlinking — which is the half you fully control.
How many pages does a topic cluster need?
Fewer than most advice suggests. What matters is whether the subtopics a reader would expect are actually covered and connected, not hitting a count. Five well-linked pages that answer five real questions do more than twenty that circle the same one with different phrasing.
Do internal links really matter that much?
They are the only signal in this whole area that is entirely under your control. External links are earned and slow; internal links are a decision you make in an afternoon. They tell a crawler which of your pages are important, what they are about, and how they relate — and on a site with a coverage problem they are almost always the missing piece.
What is a good score on the Topical Authority Map?
In this dataset the median is 42/100, so scoring 42 puts you exactly in the middle. 56 is the start of the upper quartile and 67 or above is the top 10%; below 17 is the bottom quarter. Those thresholds are specific to this tool — the 25 measures in this dataset have very different medians, so 70 here and 70 elsewhere do not mean the same thing.
Which check fails most often on the Topical Authority Map?
“Covers the topic’s subtopics”, which did not pass in 91% of scans. The costliest failures, though, are the ones scored as hard fails — this tool has 1, the most common being “Covers the topic’s subtopics” at 91%.
Questions that govern the whole series — how the sample is collected, how sites are anonymized, how often the figures are refreshed — are answered in the methodology on the hub.
Using this data
The figures, tables and charts on this page are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; the only condition is a link back to this page. Suggested citation: SeoMods — Topical Authority Map benchmarks, 2 September 2026, https://seomods.com/seo-score-benchmarks/topical-authority-map. If you need to cite by date, use the August 2026 edition instead: this page changes at every refresh and that one never does.