Joe Youngblood writes for Search Engine Land. Earlier this month he published an independent teardown of the Search Engine Land case study we wrote out about TopicalBoost.
He didn’t take our results on faith. He opened Search Engine Land’s source code to confirm how the entity schema was actually built, and found it living inside the Yoast JSON-LD graph, connected to Google Knowledge Graph identifiers through about and mentions properties. He flagged that the traffic figures are Ahrefs and Semrush estimates rather than first-party Search Console data. He noted that March 2026 carried Google core updates that hit similar sites differently. And he pointed out, plainly, that I co-created the product I was writing about.
He stops short of calling TopicalBoost the sole cause for SEL’s traffic recover. The evidence, he writes, supports “likely contributed materially” more than “direct consequence.” Even so, he then says this:
Even with that qualification, large publishers should take this strategy seriously. A publication with tens of thousands of articles often has substantial authority trapped inside old URLs, inconsistent tags and broad category archives. Converting that archive into curated entity pages with crawlable internal links is a rational response to both traditional search and AI-assisted retrieval.
He also compared us to the tools people already know. Youngblood started with InLinks. Like TopicalBoost, it pulls entities instead of matching keywords, automates internal links, and ships entity structured data. The difference he drew is which graph you build on. InLinks runs its own knowledge graph while TopicalBoost builds on the entities Google already recognizes. He read the topic-page architecture and the editorial workflow as more central to TopicalBoost than they are in general-purpose entity tools. That’s correct, and it’s deliberate.
Youngblood also noted that BrightEdge Autopilot builds internal-link clusters, but its decisions come from search-performance and opportunity data, so it links a page because that page is a ranking opportunity. TopicalBoost links a page because it and another page are about the same entity. Because of this difference, Youngblood concludes TopicalBoost is likely a better fit for publishers while BrightEdge may perform better for ecommerce sites. We agree here too.
A critic—or at least an independent third party—checking our work in public and reaching the same conclusions we did is worth more than anything we could say ourselves.