Does Topical Authority matter for LLM visibility? Yes!

4 proof points:

1/ OpenAI (and most likely other model developers as well) filter pre-training data by both quality and authority:

"At the pre-training stage, we filtered our dataset mix for GPT-4 […] and removed these documents from the pre-training set."

2/ ChatGPT classifies sources and considers only authoritative pages as "benign":

"Benign behavior is defined as ‘Any authoritative resource a diligent human might consult.’"

3/ My analysis of over 500,000 AI Overviews shows that the majority of citations point to highly authoritative and established sources.

4/ The top 10% of most visible content in Chat GPT and other LLMs rewards comprehensive content that matches the concept of high authority.

In today's Memo, I share how Topical Authority impacts AI Chatbot results, how to measure it effectively and how to move the needle.