Why corporate websites matter again

Due to adverse weather conditions, this is last Friday’s newsletter running slightly behind schedule 

Your website is now your ‘always on AI accessible gateway to your story’.

That was the stark message from Chris Corrigan, chief growth officer at digital comms agency IDX, at the recent Corporate Affairs Summit Ireland.

And while Gartner predicts a 25 per cent fall in search volumes – amounting to one billion fewer searches every day – your website is teeming with so many AI bots and crawlers that even Rentokil Initial would be hard-pressed to tackle.

(Note to Helen: Expect call from corporate communications director Malcolm Padley, reasserting Rentokil’s unrivalled expertise in pest control.)

LLMs, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini are constantly crawling your website, whether you want them to or not. And whether it is optimised for such searches, or not.

Like others, Corrigan believes these LLMs should be considered your newest stakeholder group – but it’s one that never lifts the phones, never checks facts and never asks for clarification.

AI agents prioritise information based on freshness, relevance and clarity. If content is outdated, buried in PDFs or poorly structured, they simply move on. The result, says Corrigan, can be a loss of narrative control, with third parties – or AI itself – telling your story for you.

His argument rests on a simple premise: reputation sits at the intersection of content  and visibility. Content is what an organisation says. Visibility is where that content appears. If either side weakens, reputation begins to fragment.

Corrigan argues that visibility has changed more in the past 24 weeks than it has in the past 24 years. In fact, your corporate website probably has more visitors today than a year ago – but the old metrics to measure performance fail to capture them.

He believes that the majority of websites have yet to take account of this new reality; in fact, IDX, which hosts more than 3,000 websites which get approximately two billion visitors per year, reckons about one in ten companies have a ‘really solid plan’ to tackle this, but those that address it now will be those that surface in GEO come 2027 and beyond.

Without trivialising some ‘easy fixes’, here are four areas where Corrigan suggests companies should start:

The investment case
The About Us section
The growth story

And, new for 2026…

How your company is using AI, because more investors are considering how companies are investing, adopting and integrating AI across their practices.

Does trust matter?

I am going to be contrarian. (No sniggering at the back!)

If trust is so important, why do people keep buying from brands they claim not to trust?

The latest Edelman Trust Barometer: Brand growth in an insular world, which surveyed 17,688 people across 15 countries, found that two in three respondents are hesitant or unwilling to trust somebody who is different from them.

While personally I find this statistic quite distressing, Edelman posits that such insularity threatens brand growth.

For example, it finds that 30 per cent of consumers will not use brands associated with people different from them. Maybe it’s just me but in choosing my toothpaste, say, I have rarely considered whether it is a preferred brand for people who ‘live by different core values’. I just want to ensure it performs as advertised.

Nor do I – in complete contrast to 54 per cent of the survey’s respondents – feel a connection to people who use the same brands that I do (but then I’m an Android user: I know Apple ones can be a bit fanatical).

In fact, I couldn’t tell you what brands my best friends (or even family members) use, so I am not sure how I can feel a connection to a complete stranger who shares my choice in toilet rolls.

And in this tipsy topsy world of trust, the survey finds that 39 per cent of people use brands that they do not fully trust. But what does that mean? What does trust mean in that context? I am certain that these consumers are not stupid enough to buy a brand that they don’t believe will do what it is meant to.

Here’s another puzzler from the report. While 73 per cent of respondents trust brands ‘in general’, 58 per cent would not trust a brand that sells to people with different core values to them. How would they know? Is there a report on the secret lives of brand consumers that they can check? But – here’s what the survey didn’t ask – would it stop them buying the brand?

A recent global shopping survey by ecommerce platform found that 54 per cent of consumers stopped buying a brand because it got too expensive. It also found consumers abandoned brands because of a perceived decline in the quality of products or poor customer service.

Buying decisions were influenced by tangible factors rather than the elusive trust quality. In fact, consumers frequently behave in ways that do not align neatly with what they say about trust. Or what they tell surveys.

So, what if trust is overrated?

Just saying…

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Andrew Walton, chief communications officer and chief sustainability officer, Lloyds Banking Group

Andrew Walton wears two hats. As chief communications officer and chief sustainability officer at Lloyds Banking Group, he leads two separate teams, and takes, as he puts it, ‘both titles into the group executive committee’.

The recipient of the Communications Professional of the Year at last year’s CorpComms Awards is also ‘a longstanding proponent of the notion that if you’re doing sustainability in corporate affairs, you’re doing it wrong because it isn’t CSR. This is not about reputation.’

As Walton explains: ‘In a financial institution with explicit commitments and regulatory obligations, sustainability is a distinct, functional discipline. The vast majority of the work that my [45 person] team do in sustainability is about implementing the obligations put upon us and sharpening the risk management functionality of the business.

More time to enter the CorpComms Awards

We have given you a further three weeks – bringing the deadline to 31 July – and that really will be it. Judging will take place in early August.

I’ve spent the past few weeks revisiting last year’s winners – in part because I am revamping (one step at a time) our website – and what struck me (and that is not new this year) is that success doesn’t depend on budgets. Success depends on achieving results – which may seem obvious, but is not always the case.

For example, Electrical Safety First told one man's story with such care that the Government adopted its recommendations. Octopus Money turned a single Freedom of Information request into a national debate about Premium Bonds. Virgin Media O2's fight for fairer ticketing ended, 12 months later, with a Government ban on above-face-value resale.

Different budgets, different sectors, different scales. But there was a common thread: a clear objective at the start, and evidence of change at the end. Too often entries fail to pick up a trophy because they lack a clear objective at the outset. Or because, while incredibly creative, the work simply did not actually achieve anything.

The judges see hundreds of entries. The ones that stand out draw a straight line between what you set out to do and what actually happened. If your team did something last year that changed a behaviour, a policy, a perception or a business result, that's an entry.

You have 18 days and 700 words to play with. And if our format doesn’t work for you, then simply upload an entry designed for another awards scheme. (Just do us the courtesy of putting our name on top!)

Best of luck