--- title: "Topical Coverage Score: A Spreadsheet Check Before You Open Another Cluster" description: "Score topical coverage in a spreadsheet before you open another cluster. Hold until unique intents are live, indexed, and linked both ways to the pillar." url: "https://articles.flowcrews.com/topical-coverage-score-a-spreadsheet-check-before-you-open-another-cluster" category: "Strategy" date_published: 2026-11-08 reading_time_minutes: 7 word_count: 1726 --- # Topical Coverage Score: A Spreadsheet Check Before You Open Another Cluster *A fail-closed sheet for one live cluster: score unique intents, then refuse the next subject until coverage, index status, and pillar links clear.* ![Topical Coverage Score: A Spreadsheet Check Before You Open Another Cluster](https://pub-07fb5e4955ba485b822d6b388be96d9a.r2.dev/2e474d51-a072-472e-ab2f-1a43a8990566/topical-coverage-score-a-spreadsheet-check-before-you-open-another-cluster/hero-d6f82d5c-a3e7-4015-8d3c-4fb776a2ba92.jpg) **TL;DR:** - Google does not publish a topical coverage or topical authority score; proxy it with a sheet you control. - Score unique intents, not keyword variants: one live, indexed URL that answers the intent and links both ways to the pillar. - Treat the bands as a hold rule: under 40% unfinished, 40–70% still building, above 70% the earliest point to consider an adjacent cluster. - Page-level content scores are a different job from a site-level cluster map. - Do not open another cluster to chase volume while this one is thin, unindexed, or unlinked. ## Topical Coverage Is Not the Same as Topical Authority ## Map Coverage, Ranking Coverage, and Topic Share Are Not the Same Check ## How to Score Topical Coverage in a Spreadsheet Before the Next Brief ## How Many Unique Intents Belong in One Cluster Before You Score It? ## How to Mark a Subtopic Covered, Thin, or Missing ## What Percentage Should Be Covered Before You Open Another Cluster? ## What to Do When Coverage Is High but Rankings Are Still Weak ## How Topical Coverage Affects AI Citations ## Conclusion - Coverage is not authority — topical coverage is the share of one cluster’s unique intents with a real page, while topical authority is an unpublished outcome, not a Search Console score or a reason to widen the site. - Only map coverage is the hold metric — ranking coverage and topic share are later proxies, and page grades such as Surfer or Clearscope cannot clear the next brief. - Score one live cluster in a sheet — covered unique intents divided by total intents after near-duplicates collapse, with columns for status, URL, index, both pillar links, sibling links, and a go/hold/kill decision. - Covered means a real answer — one live, indexed URL that answers the intent and links both ways to the pillar; drafts, noindex, unlinked pages, and stubs stay out of the numerator. - Keep the next subject closed until this one clears — more than 70% genuine coverage before another cluster, under 40% unfinished, 40–70% still building, rescored after publish, merge, or index changes. - Weak rankings do not open a new cluster — rewrite and link what you have, fix one-way pillar links, and prune or merge cannibalizing or duplicate intents; AI citations follow the same coverage bar. Run the fail-closed sheet on your live cluster before you brief another subject, and use Flowcrews when you want that hold-or-go check handled with the next publish. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Does Google publish a topical coverage or topical authority score? No. There is no “Topical Authority” number in Search Console. Measurement is a set of proxies: map coverage you control, ranking coverage where a page sits in Google’s top 10, and topic share (topic clicks divided by the map’s search volume), which should move last. ### What counts as a covered subtopic? A subtopic is covered only after near-duplicate intents are collapsed and one live, indexed URL owns that intent, answers it, and links both ways to the pillar. The topical keyword coverage ratio is covered subtopics divided by total subtopics on that cleaned map. ### When is it reasonable to start an adjacent cluster? Not under 40%, and not while you are still in the 40–70% building band. Above 70% is the earliest point Inbounder treats as approaching the comprehensiveness associated with expertise — and raw coverage of thin stubs is misleading, so the hold stays in place until pages are real, indexed, and linked. ### How is a cluster coverage sheet different from a page content score? Surfer’s Content Score is a 0–100 page metric whose SEO component includes topical coverage against top results. That is an on-page job. A cluster sheet scores whether the map has a published page for each unique intent, plus index status and pillar links. No tool reports topical authority directly; coverage of the map is the proxy you control. ### Why do internal links belong on the coverage row? A mapped URL that is not connected is not covered. An internal link audit of 596 posts found 295 (49%) with no in-body internal links. HubSpot’s cluster tracker uses one row per page with yes/no fields for links to and from the pillar for the same reason: unpublished links make a map look finished when the cluster is not. ### Does breadth inside one subject matter beyond classic rankings? It shows up in citation data too. Among 200 Outrank sites, 67% of those with fewer than 50 Google-visible pages had zero AI citations, while none of 110 sites with 400 or more visible pages had zero. Breadth still starts with one finished cluster, not a pile of half-built subjects. ## Sources - [https://www.getinbounder.com/learn/topical-authority/measuring-topical-authority](https://www.getinbounder.com/learn/topical-authority/measuring-topical-authority) - [https://www.outrank.so/blog/what-is-topical-authority](https://www.outrank.so/blog/what-is-topical-authority) - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Google_Search_documentation_leak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Google_Search_documentation_leak) - [https://docs.surferseo.com/en/articles/5700365-content-score-in-the-editor-explained](https://docs.surferseo.com/en/articles/5700365-content-score-in-the-editor-explained) - [https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/topic-clusters-seo](https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/topic-clusters-seo) - [https://droidcrunch.com/topical-authority-guide/](https://droidcrunch.com/topical-authority-guide/) - [https://snowseo.com/docs/user-guide/planning/topic-clusters](https://snowseo.com/docs/user-guide/planning/topic-clusters)