Some brands get away with broad topical focus. Forbes, for example, ranks well for everything from “bitcoin price” to “best pillows for neck pain.” But most brands are more visible in search when focusing their content strategy on core topics.
Topical authority is one of the most used concepts in SEO to justify content creation. It’s gone so far that swinging too far from the base can lead to algorithmic demotions (HubSpot and Clickup, to name a few significant ones). But does it translate to AI search? Or are LLMs such a new playing field that brands can really swing big?
Imagine a payroll software company planning its next 20 articles. It can chase broad, high-volume finance topics, or build out the payroll questions it wants to be known for: W-2 deadlines, contractor classification, payroll-tax errors, overtime rules, and state registration.
The topical-authority bet is to choose the second path, even when ChatGPT can answer some of those questions without sending a click. The goal is not traffic from every glossary page. It is to become a brand that appears consistently when people ask related questions, including the eventual “Which payroll software should I use?” question.
Topical authority matters in AI search, and the reason is durability. This study shows AI answers develop topic owners: Once a brand earns an outsized share of mentions in a category, it usually keeps it.
Method and limitations
To find out, the Semrush team gave me access to a big dataset based on the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit.
- Scope: 1,094 US categories, 5 prompts per category, and monthly snapshots from January through June 2026 in ChatGPT, USA only.
- The study covers 220,000+ domains, 50,000+ brands, 600,000+ citations, and 220,000+ URLs
- This study tracks which brands ChatGPT mentions most often across five prompts per category. It does not measure sentiment, recommendation quality, user trust, or purchase impact.
- The study has no topic-level organic rankings, organic visibility, or SEO share-of-voice data.
- Semrush’s export records whether a brand appears in an answer, not the surrounding text or sentiment. A mention can be positive, neutral, or negative.
Definitions:
- Owner: The brand with the highest share of brand mentions, named in at least four of the category’s 5 prompts, and at least 5 percentage points ahead of the runner-up.
- Emerging leader: The most-mentioned brand appears in at least three prompts but does not meet the clear-leader threshold.
- Unsettled category: No leading brand appears in at least three prompts.
Important note: The definition for unsettled category makes sense based on the threshold we’ve seen in this specific study, but don’t treat it as a universal truth at this time.
While almost half of cited pages in the study were hard to classify (a mix of cryptic URLs like “examplesite.gov/0982349” that don’t have common/standard page types), we found that…
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