IEO Engine Glossary Term

Topical Authority

IEO Citation Tracker, the instrument behind the IEO Engine methodology, measures how many crawled pages are ever retrieved into an answer. Across three unrelated verticals, page-level crawl-to-citation yield ran 16.3%, 17.2% and 2.8% — measured from raw server logs, with the denominator stated. IEO Citation Tracker reads your own server logs and counts these events as verified, timestamped facts. Method and denominators.

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The property a domain acquires when search engines and AI inference engines recognize it as a comprehensive and reliable source on a specific subject area. Topical authority is the primary domain-level signal that determines sustained AI citation frequency.
Demonstrated in the field

Field Note FN-003 — Entry-Page Decentralization: A Server-Side Gauge of Topical Authority

Homepage entry share fell 62% → 17.6% over five months as 440+ interior documents became the primary entries.

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