Topical authority is the degree to which a website covers one area in depth and with internal coherence. Instead of scattered articles about everything, it rests on a cluster: a pillar page that defines the topic, and around it subpages devoted to individual questions, linked together with descriptive anchor text. The benefit is twofold. In search, trust is transferred between the pages of the cluster, so content ranks that would have no chance on its own. In generative search, it increases the probability that at least one of your passages will cover one of the sub-queries. It is built top-down: choose an area where you have real experience, write out the questions that belong to it, and work through them one by one. It is better to have thirty strong pages on one topic than three hundred superficial ones spread across five.
See also: Content cannibalisation, Content gap in retrieval, Canonical brand answer.
