How To Build Authority in a Technical Domain

As of this writing in 2026, I estimate that less than 1% of marketers in technical domains currently plan authority building as a dedicated marketing activity.

The problem is, though, that authority plays such a key role in search, AI search, and brand awareness which everyone wants and needs, and ignoring it causes trouble across the spectrum of marketing activities.

If you are a marketer in a technical domain, such as developer tools, and want to build your organisation’s authority this year, here are a few important things to understand.

Authority is recognised knowledge

Per the Oxford Dictionary of English:

authority

‍

the power to influence others, especially because of [...] one's recognized knowledge about something.

* the confidence resulting from personal expertise: he hit the ball with authority.

* a person with extensive or specialized knowledge about a subject; an expert.

* a book or other source able to supply reliable information or evidence.

If we apply this to organisations operating in technical domains, for your organisation to be perceived as an authority on a technical topic, you need to hold recognised knowledge on that topic. And this means:

1. you need extensive, possibly unique, expert-level knowledge about the topic
2. have recognition of that knowledge within your target group of people

Search engines have lots of functionality to try and figure out who is the authority, and it’s helpful to look at them to see how that works.

Search engines’ authority perception as a proxy for the real world

Convincing search engines of your authority is generally good because that means you will get more traffic, and will make more sales. It’s also a helpful proxy for how people perceive authority online.

Search engines’ ultimate goal is to deliver a good user experience to their users, and that means they want to prioritise showing the most trustworthy answers first.

Google has a number of patents around understanding trustworthiness of a website, covering clever ways of:

• determining content authorship
• calculating the boundaries of author’s expertise
• calculating author rank against other authors
• calculating site’s expertise and rank
• measuring user experience
• measuring references (backlinks) from other sites of a particular type and rank
• using historical data

While there is a lot of nuance in the patents, the simple advice for authority-building in the eyes of search engines for technology organisations would be:

1. produce content that Google can understand and assign to authors
2. offer a good user experience for your readers
3. have references from other sites
4. do this consistently for some time in order to accumulate historical data

A search engine only serves an answer if a user asks, and most people will not ask it about your technical topic. That’s just how it goes.

How individuals perceive informational authority of a webpage

Most people searching for technical topics online have no idea whether you are an authority or not when they click on your website link. And they need to find out whether to trust you or not in the first seconds after landing on your page.

Here are some things that users will scan for - note that this is effectively in addition to what the search engines are looking for.The user has already trusted the search engine to provide results worth clicking on!

• how your content is structured, and whether it’s written in authoritative, detailed, yet accessible language that meets the visitors where they are
• how your website looks, including visuals, user experience, brand
• are there any annoying UX elements such as those newsletter signup banners
• clarity on whether you have something to sell, and what, as users are smart enough to understand that there may be hidden motivations at play
• social proof, customer feedback, reviews

In theory, a user will consider all of this carefully, then decide whether to trust you or not… In reality, this entire process may take just a few seconds, and factors of influence may be as silly as the colour of the background you picked.

There is one way to sidestep this authority perception game: brand.

Brand sidesteps some authoritativeness criteria

The rules of mental availability apply to informational authority. For example, when you see an organic search result from Wikipedia, you generally associate it with a neutral, encyclopaedia-like entry that’s a bit dry and perhaps a bit outdated.

If you see an article from martinfowler.com in the search results, you generally associate it with an opinionated, long-form guide from a person who knows their stuff when it comes to software development.

When you have a positive brand perception, more searchers will know of your site before having searched and will thus be more likely to click on your article. But how do you build that perception if you don’t have 20 years to do so like in the case of Wikipedia and Martin Fowler?

You take initiative and make them aware of your brand before they need the info. That means not just focusing on search, but also on other communications such as social media, advertising, and PR to actively “push out” your content.

Pushing your content out requires budget - or being clever

To get people to read your content when they are not yet actively looking for it, one approach is to use paid impressions. Advertising platforms will happily sell those to you, so if you have a budget, proactive content promotion can be as simple as running ad campaigns with your content to your target audience.

If you don’t have a budget, or if your ambitions are greater than your budget, or maybe if you feel like ads are not enough, you can also try going viral on places such as Hacker News. A solid Hacker News success can bring in hundreds of thousands of impressions from your ideal customer profile (ICP) for free, that is, not including the work putting together the content and asking everyone in your contacts to upvote.

Most importantly, success at promoting one content piece should make an impact on all content pieces, across all channels, due to building a positive brand association.

How technical companies can build authority in 2026

In summary: to build authority in 2026, here is what we are recommending and doing with our client base:

1. choose adequately-sized informational niches given available budgets and business goals
2. produce content that users love and Google can understand and assign to authors
3. facilitate distribution of this content through other sites via links, and through social media, advertising, and PR to reach not just in-market people but those unaware as well
4. do this for some time in order to accumulate historical data and learnings
5. in parallel, build out measurement systems to show whether we are moving in the right direction

Caveat: don’t build authority too hard

The key to successfully building authority is for your audience to not notice that this is what you’re doing. Even if you are running ads, they must seem organic, with an impression frequency that’s not too high. If you are using Hacker News, uploading every single article you have there will likely not help.