Topical Authority
A site-level ranking signal based on how deeply and coherently a website covers a specific subject area, as measured by Google's internal siteFocusScore and siteRadius variables.
Topical authority is Google's assessment of how comprehensively a website covers a particular subject. The 2024 Content Warehouse API leak confirmed Google measures it using three variables: site2vecEmbeddingEncoded (a vector embedding of the site's overall theme), siteFocusScore (how dedicated a site is to a topic), and siteRadius (how far individual pages deviate from the site's central theme). Sites build topical authority through deep, interlinked content clusters rather than isolated keyword-targeted pages.
Also known as
topical authority, topic authority, topical relevance, site topical authority