Topical Authority
Checker

A score of 65+ (grade B) is a solid baseline for most competitive topics — it means you have meaningful depth and cover most of the subtopics your competitors do. A score of 80+ (grade A) indicates established authority, typically meaning 15+ relevant pages with broad subtopic coverage. Scores below 50 mean you have significant gaps, and below 35 means you have minimal coverage — competitors will consistently outrank you for long-tail queries in this topic until you build out more content.

Domain authority (DA) is a third-party metric based primarily on your backlink profile — how many sites link to you and how authoritative those sites are. Topical authority measures something different: how comprehensively you cover a specific subject with your own content. A site can have a high DA but weak topical authority on a specific topic (a general news site writing one article about email marketing), or low DA but strong topical authority (a niche blog that covers every angle of email marketing deeply). Google increasingly values topical authority for content-heavy queries — it signals expertise and trustworthiness independent of backlinks.

Yes — and arguably more than it affects traditional Google rankings. AI search engines like Perplexity, ChatGPT with web search, and Google's AI Overviews synthesize answers from multiple sources. Sites cited most frequently are those that cover a topic comprehensively across multiple related pages — not sites with a single strong article. Building topical authority through content clusters directly increases your probability of being cited across a range of related queries, since AI systems prefer sources that appear authoritative across the full topic, not just one angle.

This tool analyses your URL structure — specifically the path segments in each URL — using NLP tokenisation and bigram frequency analysis. URL slugs like /email-marketing/list-building-strategies are highly predictive of page content: the tokens "list" + "building" and "strategies" cluster together to form a subtopic signal. Structural segments (blog, post, guide, etc.) are filtered out as noise. The result is an accurate subtopic map with no need to crawl page content.

The score has four components: Depth (35pts) — a log-scale measure of how many relevant pages you have, where 15+ pages earns full marks; Breadth (35pts) — how many distinct subtopics you cover relative to the best competitor in the comparison; Focus (20pts) — the ratio of topically relevant pages to total pages, rewarding sites that concentrate on the topic; and Base (10pts) — awarded for having any relevant content at all. This means a site with 5 deep, focused articles can outscore one with 50 shallow, scattered ones.

The Coverage Matrix is a grid showing every subtopic on the left and each analysed domain across the top. A green checkmark means that domain has at least one page covering the subtopic; a dash means it doesn't. Cells are highlighted in amber for your domain when a competitor covers something you don't — making gaps immediately scannable without reading the full gap list.

No. You can run a full analysis of your domain plus two competitors completely free with no account required. There is a limit of 5 analyses per day per IP address to prevent abuse.

The tool discovers sitemaps automatically by checking /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, and your robots.txt. If none are found, the tool will return an error for that domain. Most CMS platforms (WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, Ghost, Astro) generate sitemaps automatically — if yours doesn't, adding one is a quick SEO win in itself.