Topical boost helps identify keywords for our writers and boosts our SEO, it also provides proof of impact through a Google News feature that shows when we appear in Google News for any search terms. Since activation on September 17, 2025, Top Stories appearances on our site are at 124, compared to 22 in the seven months immediately before activation. Cumulative monthly search exposure now totals 13.2 million, up substantially from where we had it pegged in the spring (2.9 million)—high-profile placements landed on terms like "TikTok" (10.2M monthly searches), "Super Tuesday" (744K), and "Outer Banks" (421K). Average web search position improved from 17.4 to 8.6 over the same window. The entity-query story is also interesting. In May 2026, eight of the top ten organic queries driving clicks to our site were entity-rich—specific people, specific bills, specific events your editors are actually covering. The site now ranks position 1 for "highway patrol" (7,184 clicks/month), position 1.7 for "heather ammel," position 2.8 for "roy cooper polls," position 3.5 for "north carolina senate race," position 4.7 for "decarlos brown jr," and position 5.9 for "mark robinson." That's TopicalBoost's structured data doing what it's supposed to: connecting the entities your editors mention to Google's Knowledge Graph so the right pages surface for the right queries. One specific query worth calling out: "constitutional carry states" went from 18 clicks at position 9.8 pre-activation to 1,059 clicks at position 1.8 after—roughly a 60x increase on a single search term.

It's incorporated best SEO practices into our website that keep us relevant to Search engines and AI.