Black Sun Global’s eleventh annual Digital Index reveals companies have mastered the corporate narrative - but when it comes to AI discoverability, most are barely off the start line.
Aiming high or failing fast: are corporate websites ready for the AI era?
In brief
For most of the last decade, the gap between digital leaders and everyone else was a story about websites: who had the sharper narrative, the slicker experience, the richer reporting. That story is largely over. The fundamentals of corporate digital communication are now well understood - and most large organisations do them well.
This year’s Digital Index finds a new dividing line, and it runs straight through artificial intelligence. As AI-driven search, summaries and conversational interfaces become how stakeholders find and interpret information, the question is no longer whether your website is good. It’s whether AI can find it, read it and trust it. On that measure, most companies are only just beginning.
Inside the numbers
- Eleven years of analysis, around 200 variables, spanning the FTSE 100, a sample of the FTSE 250, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng and Singapore’s STI 30
- 73%: average score for corporate narrative - the strongest-performing area
- 22%: average score for AI and discoverability - the weakest, by a distance
- 94% now communicate a clear corporate purpose
- 9% disclose how AI is led or governed in their business
What the Digital Index measures
Now in its eleventh year, the Digital Index is built on over a decade of tracking how leading organisations adapt to the demands of digital corporate communication. This year’s study analysed around 200 variables across the FTSE 100, a representative sample of the FTSE 250, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng and Singapore’s STI 30 - assessing how well corporate websites serve the stakeholders who matter most: investors, employees, customers, job seekers, the media and wider society.
The research examines performance across three areas: the quality and relevance of stakeholder content, the experience that encourages deeper engagement, and - new this year as a dedicated lens - AI discoverability. Here is what it found.
1. The corporate story has come of age
The corporate narrative is no longer a point of difference; it’s the price of entry. Companies now communicate purpose, strategy and value with real consistency, and the same maturity extends across the investor, sustainability and careers content that stakeholders rely on. Where leaders pull ahead is coherence - linking strategy, value creation and differentiation into one connected story rather than a set of well-built but separate sections.
Top performers: Coca-Cola HBC, Diageo, Halma, Burberry, Rio Tinto
- 94% communicate a clear corporate purpose
- 75% set out their strategic objectives
- 77% provide at-a-glance summaries
- 59% articulate a distinct investment case
- 69% now publish targets for their sustainability focus areas
- +16% rise in companies bringing culture to life for job seekers
2. Experience is rising, but findability lags
Companies are visibly investing in experience, using video, dynamic content and interactive features to bring purpose and differentiation to life rather than simply decorate the page. But engagement is undermined by the basics of findability - almost every site has a search function, yet far fewer offer anything genuinely useful, and remarkably many still fail to index their own PDFs. In a world where content has to be retrievable to be valuable, information locked in documents a search engine cannot read is effectively invisible. That weakness becomes far more consequential once AI enters the picture.
Top performers: Vodafone, ICG, Haleon
- 70% use video across their site
- 40% use dynamic content loading
- 95% have a site search
- 47% offer a advanced search
- 82% provide related-content signposting
- 73% publish an accessibility statement
3. The AI readiness gap
This is where aiming high meets failing fast. The research looks at two things: the narrative of AI - how well companies explain their approach, governance and advantage - and the plumbing of AI - how well content is structured for machine discovery. On the first, communicating an AI advantage is still an emerging story: fewer than one in ten companies say anything publicly about how AI is led or governed, a striking silence on a topic now central to board agendas and stakeholder trust. On the second, technical readiness lags further still, with most results and data locked in formats AI systems cannot easily read. The gap that defines this year’s Index runs between those two realities.
Top performers: IMI, Haleon, HSBC
- 22%: average score for AI and discoverability
- 47% describe AI’s impact on their business
- 9% disclose how AI is led or governed
- 39% publish results in accessible HTML rather than PDF
- 3% provide AI-friendly summaries
- 4% offer on-site AI chat
What this means for leaders
The strategic read is straightforward. The work that consumed digital teams for a decade - narrative, investor storytelling, sustainability, experience - is largely done, and doing it well no longer sets you apart. The next source of advantage, and the next source of risk, is whether your organisation is visible, legible and credible in an AI-mediated world.
That is not a technical fix to be delegated. It touches how the investment case is structured, how sustainability data is published, how governance is disclosed, and how confident leaders are that AI tools will represent the company accurately when stakeholders ask. Treating AI discoverability as a board-level question now will define the next decade of digital communication. Waiting for the picture to settle? You may find AI has already decided how your business is seen.
Want to go deeper?
You can explore the full Digital Index 2026 here. If you’d like a personalised benchmark of your own digital communications - including how you perform in AI search - we’d be happy to connect you with our Digital specialists at Black Sun Global.