This tool judges a site rather than a single page, and it asks whether there is depth behind an article or whether the article stands on its own. SeoMods uses this benchmark to assess topic coverage, the relationships between pieces of content and a site’s internal topic structure: are the subtopics of the subject present on the site, and do the pages link to each other. It is not a metric Google publishes, and it does not directly measure how search engines assess coverage.
Here is where that sits. The median SeoMods score is 42/100, which ranks it 18 of the 25 tools with a published benchmark by median. The ranking runs over the 25 tools on the main benchmark page; 1st is the highest median. The middle half of results falls between 17 and 56 — a band 39 points wide. That is wide: in this sample sites’ scores diverge markedly on this measure.
How the scores are distributed
An average on its own misleads. The chart below splits all 5,208 scans into five score bands, totalling 100%. The spread is wide and fairly even: in this sample sites land at very different levels on this measure.
- 0–19
- 20–39
- 40–59
- 60–79
- 80–100
| Score band | Topical Authority |
|---|---|
| 0–19 | 26% · 1,350 |
| 20–39 | 17% · 872 |
| 40–59 | 41% · 2,138 |
| 60–79 | 9% · 462 |
| 80–100 | 7% · 386 |
| Total runs | 5,208 |
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 does my score sit?
Read this as breadth times connection. Publishing ten related articles that never link to one another scores poorly on this tool: by its check list they are ten unconnected 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 | P10 | P25 | Median | P75 | P90 | Mean | Lowest | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Topical Authority | 17 | 17 | 42 | 56 | 67 | 42.6 | 0 | 100 |
A score from the Topical Authority Map can be read against the five values below. All of them are calculated from the scans in this benchmark: they place a SeoMods score within this sample, not in Google’s results.
| Percentile | Score | What it means for a score |
|---|---|---|
| P10 | 17 | About one scan in ten scored 17 or lower. Below it, a page is in the lowest tenth of this sample. |
| P25 | 17 | The edge of the bottom quarter. A score under 17 is below about three quarters of the scans. |
| Median | 42 | The middle of the sample: half the scans scored lower, half higher. A score of 42 is the typical result here. |
| P75 | 56 | Where the top quarter begins. A score of 56 or more is at or above about three quarters of the scans. |
| P90 | 67 | Where the top tenth begins. A score of 67 or more is among the highest 10% of scans in this sample. |
Some of these values coincide. That happens when many scans land on exactly the same score, so the bands between them are not separate bands at all — read the equal values as one step.
Percentiles describe the sites SeoMods scanned, not the whole web, and they apply to this tool only: the same number on another tool sits somewhere else.
The SeoMods checks most often unmet
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 | Not met (share of scans) | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Covers the topic’s subtopics | 90% | Hard fail |
| Structured data present | 61% | Partial |
| Topic reinforced in headings | 56% | Partial |
| Topic present in the homepage title | 40% | Partial |
| Enough supporting pages | 33% | Partial |
| Internal linking depth | 28% | Partial |
The rate is the share of scans in which a SeoMods check was not met. It is SeoMods’ criterion, not Google’s assessment of these pages. “Hard fail” means the check’s full weight is deducted from the SeoMods score; “partial” means part of it.
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 82% 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. In this sample what brings a SeoMods score down is mostly not one large omission but accumulated small ones.
Run the Topical Authority Map on your own page
Month by month
This page adds every published month together. Underneath it, each month is frozen as an edition of its own whose figures are never edited again — which is the only reason two months can be set side by side at all. Below is the Topical Authority Map across the 2 published editions, with the combined figure in the last row of the table.
Between August 2026 and September 2026 the median went from 42 to 47, and the share of scans at 80 or above went from 7% to 8%. The two months do not measure the same sites — the September 2026 sample has about 3 times as many sites — so read the gap as a change in the cross-section measured, not as the same sites getting better or worse.
| Edition | Median | vs. previous | Scored 80+ | Issues/run | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2026 | 42 | baseline | 7% | 3.1 | 1,414 |
| September 2026 | 47 | +5 pts | 8% | 3.1 | 3,794 |
| All published months, combined | 42 | — | 7% | 3.1 | 5,208 |
Reading a monthly difference. Each month is a separate sample, and its size changes from month to month. A change in sample size can move a median and a distribution by itself, so a monthly difference should not be mistaken for a change in scores: it does not show that sites improved or got worse.
Which checks moved
Each check’s rate in the first edition that measured it, beside its rate in the latest. Moves under two points are marked as no change: these are independent monthly samples of a shifting set of sites, and a difference that small is not evidence that anything on the web changed.
| Check | Not met in August 2026 | Not met in September 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structured data present | 56% · August 2026 | 62% · September 2026 | +6 pp |
| Topic present in the homepage title | 44% · August 2026 | 39% · September 2026 | −5 pp |
| Enough supporting pages | 37% · August 2026 | 32% · September 2026 | −5 pp |
| Internal linking depth | 31% · August 2026 | 27% · September 2026 | −4 pp |
| Topic reinforced in headings | 54% · August 2026 | 57% · September 2026 | +3 pp |
| Covers the topic’s subtopics Hard fail | 91% · August 2026 | 90% · September 2026 | no change |
What this score does not measure
- It is not a topical authority metric published by Google. Google publishes no such score.
- It does not measure a site’s actual expertise or the quality of its content. It measures the crawlable traces of coverage and internal linking.
- It is not a Google ranking. A high score does not guarantee a better position, and a low one does not mean Google has penalised the page.
About this benchmark. This benchmark is calculated from data on the sites SeoMods has scanned. The results do not necessarily represent all websites, or a random selection of them. The scores express SeoMods’ own measurement and scoring criteria; they are not ranking, quality, E-E-A-T or AI visibility scores issued by Google. Sample, anonymization and licence: the full methodology.
Frequently asked questions
What is topical authority?
It is the observation, widely made in SEO, 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. This tool measures the checks SeoMods defined for topic coverage, content relationships and internal topic structure — the structural side, which is the part you fully control. The effect of this score on Google rankings was not measured by this data.
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 SeoMods score is 42/100, so scoring 42 sits exactly in the middle of the sample. 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 tools with a published benchmark have very different medians, so 70 here and 70 elsewhere do not mean the same thing. They place a page among the sites SeoMods scanned; they say nothing about Google rankings.
Is the score from the Topical Authority Map issued by Google?
No. It is a benchmark score calculated against the check list SeoMods defined for this tool. Google publishes no topical authority score; this is the benchmark SeoMods uses to assess topic coverage, the relationships between pieces of content and a site’s internal topic structure, and it is not a hard technical measurement. A SeoMods check going unmet does not mean Google has penalised the page or ranked it lower.
Which SeoMods check goes unmet most often on the Topical Authority Map?
“Covers the topic’s subtopics”, which was not met in 90% of scans. The largest losses on the SeoMods score, though, come from the checks scored as hard fails — this tool has 1, the most common being “Covers the topic’s subtopics” at 90%.
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 October 2026, https://seomods.com/seo-score-benchmarks/topical-authority-map. If you need to cite by date, use the September 2026 edition instead: this page changes at every refresh and that one never does.