Is my AI tool actually improving topical authority?

So, I've been diligently using a couple of those fancy AI content tools, you know, the ones that promise to supercharge your semantic SEO efforts. They keep throwing these 'topical authority' scores at me, saying I'm doing great, but honestly, I feel like they're just making up numbers sometimes, or maybe the software just wants to feel good about itself. What are some genuinely objective ways to measure if my content is actually building real topical authority with Google, beyond what my shiny AI dashboard claims?