Instead of changing what you write, give Google a structured-data layer to read.
Topic and entity infrastructure for digital publishers
Most SEO tools were built for keyword campaigns. If you’re an SEO lead at a publisher, they don’t fit how your team actually works.
Rather than telling you what to write, TopicalBoost connects every article to Google’s Knowledge Graph, so Google better understands the focus of each article and the overall theme of your publication.
This simple topic mapping has helped our customers earn more organic traffic and more placements in Top Stories, Google Discover, and Google News without changing a word of their content.
football team”
“@id”: “kg:/g/01y3v”
wikidata.org/Q205033
in the United States” “description”: “Tax on
real estate in the U.S.”
“@id”: “kg:/g/0dlj_6r”
wikidata.org/Q7250248
“@id”: “kg:/g/02qgtkw”
wikidata.org/Q5292744
As featured on
Search Engine Land activated TopicalBoost in March. Over the next 13 weeks, editorial SEO publishers lost 30% of their traffic on average. Search Engine Land grew 13%. AI Overview citations more than doubled.
Trusted by editorial teams at
Most SEO software wasn’t built for publishers.
If you’ve invested in keyword research tools or page optimization apps like Clearscope or Surfer, you’ve probably watched them go unused. That’s because most SEO software isn’t built for publishers. It’s made for local businesses, e-commerce sites, or subscription-software sites (like this one). They have fixed targets—keywords they know will drive traffic and sales.
Publishers don’t work that way. You’re not writing to win a keyword, you’re trying to cover live, fast-moving stories. Keyword-first tools don’t help you when you’re reacting to real-world events and the target is always moving.
Fundamentally these tools are built to do one thing: tell you what to write. But your writers and editors are never going to take writing advice from a spreadsheet. Instead of writing to fit the search engine, you need a tool to fit the search engine to your writing.
You need content infrastructure.
The BBC, Reuters, and AP figured this out years ago—they spend millions on proprietary taxonomy systems that organize their content libraries around the people, places, and concepts they cover. It’s why they show up in Top Stories and Google Discover so consistently.
TopicalBoost does the same job, with one thing their bespoke systems can’t match. Their taxonomies use proprietary vocabularies that need a translation layer to communicate with Google. We use Google’s Knowledge Graph directly, so every article you publish connects to entities Google already knows. Same vocabulary, no translation required.
Site-wide technical SEO fixes help Google crawl your site. TopicalBoost is the site-wide fix that helps Google understand it.
Set up once. Runs automatically. Quick daily workflow.
Analyze your entire archive. Control what changes.
TopicalBoost analyzes your entire archive from day one. No per-page credits, no extra fees. Every article you’ve ever published gets connected to Google’s Knowledge Graph. Thousands of new internal links connect your archive to your latest coverage on each topic.
In a few hours (or days for larger sites), TopicalBoost reshapes your site without changing a word of your content. That’s why clients typically see Google re-crawl their entire site within days of launch.
A reshape that big means you need to see what’s changing, and override it where necessary. The topic list shows every entity detected. Hide a name, a brand, or an off-mission concept with one click. Once hidden, an entity will never show up again, even if it’s detected in future articles.
Declare topics, route authority.
Topical authority has two ingredients: the topics you cover and the authority you’ve built around them. Most publishers leave both to Google’s inference. TopicalBoost declares them directly—every article tied to a Knowledge Graph entity, every internal link routed to the topic page that needs it most.
Declaring your topics
Schema markup ties every article to a Knowledge Graph entity Google already knows. Ambiguous text strings become unique entities—indexed and recognized across Organic Search, Top Stories, Google Discover, and Google News.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Article",
"mainEntity": {
"@type": ["Thing", "Organization"],
"@id": "kg:/g/07t65",
"name": "United Nations",
"url": "https://www.un.org/",
"sameAs": [
"https://wikidata.org/wiki/Q1065",
"https://twitter.com/UN"
],
"location": {
"@type": "Country",
"name": "United States"
}
}
}Routing your authority
Most publisher archives have lots of backlinks, but they’re scattered across thousands of individual articles. Those articles may link to broad category pages, but people seldom search for terms like “Politics” or “Technology.”
TopicalBoost links entities mentioned in your articles to dedicated topic pages that focus on a person, organization, product, policy, or concept. This turns scattered link equity into concentrated authority, topic by topic.
A shortcode or a single line of PHP integrates topics into your frontend.
The 3-step editorial workflow
TopicalBoost lives inside your CMS. No opening new tabs, no dashboards to learn. Your editors make three choices per post:
Step 1
Define your focus.
When you write a draft, TopicalBoost scans it using Natural Language Processing to find the people, places, and concepts inside. Editors drag-and-drop entities into Main Topic, Also About, and Mentioned.
Step 2
Spot the opportunity at a glance.
Search volume and keyword difficulty for identified entities appears right in your CMS—so editors can make informed focus-topic choices without leaving the editor.
Color = how hard the topic is to rank for.
Step 3
Craft titles & descriptions searchers will click.
TopicalBoost will generate title tags and meta descriptions that incorporate your focus topic. Editors select what fits best and can tweak as needed. This makes SEO best practices a baked-in part of your process, rather than rules to remember.
Titles and meta description stay under Google’s character limits.
Built for any stack
WordPress
Native plugin
Drupal
Native module
Custom API
Direct API integration
Elevate your entire publication.
Stop fighting for traffic one article at a time.
Illinois Policy saw organic search traffic grow 62% in the first 60 days of using TopicalBoost. That growth held at 37% over six months, moving from an average of 935K to 1.28M monthly sessions. Google Discover clicks tripled from 49K → 154K, hitting 244,000 in December 2025. Average search position moved from 10.5 to 7.0. Top-3 positions increased by 26%.
Carolina Journal activated TopicalBoost in September 2025. In the six months after launch, they earned 106 Top Stories appearances across 83 unique pages—up from 22 appearances in the six months before. 71 of those 106 appearances landed at position 1 or 2 in the carousel.
Just before Washington state’s budget battle heated up, Washington Policy Center connected their custom CMS to the TopicalBoost API. They went from near-zero Google Discover traffic to over 22,500 Discover clicks in the first 90 days—including a 9,714-click single-day high on a property-tax article eleven days after launch.
After installing TopicalBoost, Reason magazine’s Google Discover traffic nearly quadrupled, reaching over 225,000 clicks a month. The publication also saw its largest-ever Google News day—over 40,000 clicks—after launching TopicalBoost.
Before TopicalBoost, FDD had essentially no Google News traffic and modest Google Discover traffic. In the first 8 months after launching, Discover traffic grew over 1,000% and Google News went from barely noticeable to over 100,000 clicks.
Ready to put TopicalBoost to work on your archive?
Get featured alongside Reuters, CNN, and The New York Times.
By clustering content around entities in Google’s Knowledge Graph, TopicalBoost helps our customers earn Top Stories placements alongside national and regional news brands.
illinoispolicy.org
“bears new stadium”
7k monthly searches · sustained 5 hours
carolinajournal.com
“kyndryl”
23k monthly searches · sustained 18 hours
insideinvestigator.org
“marijuana”
147k monthly searches · sustained 3 hours
foreignpolicy.com
“israel war”
1.4M monthly searches · sustained 4 hours
washingtonpolicy.org
“seattle public schools”
15k monthly searches · sustained 3 days 8 hours
fdd.org
“hamas”
247k monthly searches · sustained 33 minutes
reason.com
“supreme court”
403k monthly searches · sustained 2 hours
city-journal.org
“bernie sanders”
949k monthly searches · sustained 27 hours
goodauthority.org
“india pakistan news”
18k monthly searches · sustained 47 hours
Prove your impact in Top Stories.
Your team already tracks media mentions. Search Clippings does the same for Google Top Stories. You see when you captured a news cycle, which competitors you ranked alongside, and how long you held the top spot.
Pricing for publishers
No contracts. No hidden costs.
Get started risk-free with our 60-day money-back guarantee.
All plans include:
Free training and onboarding
Every customer gets free, live training and onboarding.
Unlimited archive analysis
Analyze and assign topics to your entire back catalogue regardless of your plan.
Complete data retention
Your data is stored in your CMS and is yours forever. You only pay for ongoing analysis.
Quality support
If you’re a customer, we’re here to help. Quality support is not an upsell.
Every feature
There are no add-on tiers. Every feature is included in every plan.
Continuous updates
We’re always evolving. Enjoy ongoing updates to the plugin and API as we improve.
Book a demo.
Spend 45 minutes with Cord Blomquist, founder of TopicalBoost. You’ll see the in-editor experience inside your CMS, walk through how we connect your archive to Google’s Knowledge Graph, and explore the editorial controls that make rolling out TopicalBoost and managing your topics straightforward. Best attended by SEO leads. Audience and editorial leads welcome too.
Common questions
How is TopicalBoost different from Yoast or RankMath?
We don’t replace them. We extend them. Yoast and RankMath handle on-page SEO basics like title tags, sitemaps, and redirects. TopicalBoost adds the entity-level structured data they don’t: every article gets connected to Google’s Knowledge Graph, and your archive’s authority gets routed to your newest coverage. Search Engine Land runs both Yoast and TopicalBoost on the same site.
Does TopicalBoost use AI to generate content?
No. TopicalBoost uses Natural Language Processing to read what your editors wrote—to identify the people, places, and concepts already in the draft. We don’t generate article copy, summaries, or rewrites. AI does suggest five title-tag and meta-description options for each post, but editors choose and edit before publishing. Your content stays human-written.
Will TopicalBoost slow down my site?
No. Analysis runs on our infrastructure, not yours. The plugin makes one API call when a post is saved and writes structured data into the page head. No frontend JavaScript, no third-party trackers, no Core Web Vitals impact.
What does setup actually look like?
For WordPress and Drupal: install the plugin, paste an API key, run a one-time bulk analysis. That analysis will process every post you’ve ever published and writes structured data across your site. Editors don’t need to change their workflow—TopicalBoost lives inside the existing editor as a panel below the post body. End-to-end setup is typically a call that lasts less than an hour with a member of our team.
What if we already have a taxonomy team?
TopicalBoost works underneath your existing taxonomy, not in place of it. Your team’s manual tags stay where they are. We add the machine-readable entity layer Google needs. Each entity connects to a matching Knowledge Graph entry. Most of our customers use both: taxonomy for editorial navigation, TopicalBoost for search and Discover signals.
Do you support more than WordPress & Drupal?
WordPress and Drupal have native plugins maintained by our team. Craft CMS is supported through our partner Good Work. For custom and headless setups, we offer a REST API.