We just published the Topical Authority Report that measured 42 topical maps, 535,239 Google rankings and 354,955 AI citations.
One thing to note before we get into findings. Every website competing inside a topical map falls into one of four tiers, based on the share of the map's topics where it holds a top-20 Google position.
Giant: 50% or more
Authority: 25% to 50%
Specialist: 5% to 25%
Tourist: under 5%
These names describe ranked coverage only.
They say nothing about content coverage, content quality, expertise, or trust.
In the average map, 97.2% of the ranking websites are Tourists, holding less than 5% of topics. But they also hold 63.1% of all the map’s available top-20 positions.
Here's the average share of a website’s presence in AI Overview citations for each tier:
Giant: 30.8% of the map’s topics
Authority: 16.5%
Specialist: 4.4%
Tourist: 0.14%
The same order held on AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
It also held across all six industry groups.
That makes sense. The more you rank in a map, the more you are cited.
But here’s where it starts to get interesting.
26.8% to 43.7% of AI citations went to websites that didn’t rank for that query, but did rank elsewhere in the same map.
And 12.7% to 28.1% went to websites that ranked nowhere in that map at all.
The data also tells us that more ranked coverage across a map didn’t improve the odds of a citation for a query it’s already ranking for. But it did improve the odds of a citation on other queries the site wasn’t ranking for.
A website ranking for queries A, B and C was more likely to be cited for query D, where the site wasn’t ranking, versus getting cited for query A.
Authority moves across topics.
This is why the topic-first approach is here to stay.
These are the things you can only know when you’re measuring against a real set of distinct topics - your Topical Map.
Measured against a keyword list with a hundred overlapping terms, the percentages and numbers mean nothing.
Open your map and check what share of its topics you currently hold a top-20 position for. Compare it to your citations.
