Topical Map
A topical map is a plan of every question a website needs to answer on one topic, and how those pages connect, drawn up before the writing starts. SEO consultant Koray Tuğberk Gübür wrote the idea up in a 2021 case study: make the map before publishing the first article, and link the pages in a logical order.
Source: Koray Tuğberk Gübür, Importance of Topical Authority: A Semantic SEO Case Study, Oncrawl (February 11, 2021), checked October 29, 2026
What Topical Map means for your business
Topical completeness, sometimes called semantic completeness, is how much of that map a site has filled in. In the same study, Gübür sums up his view as topical authority equals topical coverage times historical data: how well you cover a subject, and for how long. That's his model. Google hasn't published one like it.
The map itself can be a plain spreadsheet. We'd give each row one buyer question, then fill in the page or section that answers it, the words customers use for it, the pages that should link to it, and whether it's written yet. Gübür's study suggests building the first list from competitors' sitemaps and Google's autocomplete suggestions. The rows with nothing written yet become the writing plan, in the order buyers ask them.
If you've got pages but no plan for how they fit together, mapping and writing the pages your buyers need is where our citation-ready content work starts.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, most of Google's first page was about topographic maps, while the AI Overview gave the SEO meaning from SEO blogs, Medium and LinkedIn posts. ChatGPT called it a blueprint for a site's content and cited nothing.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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