In our latest webinar, The future of corporate websites: How AI is reshaping the digital experience, Richard Dixon, Chief Digital Officer at Black Sun, explored how AI is changing the digital communications value chain, from search, content creation and publishing to website experiences and performance measurement. The session also examined the emergence of AI chat within corporate websites and the trends likely to shape their development over the coming years.
AI is changing how different audiences discover, access and engage with corporate information. As search becomes increasingly mediated by AI, organisations need to consider how their websites can continue to provide valuable human experiences while also making their content accessible and understandable to AI systems.
It was an engaging webinar, with attendee questions covering multilingual AI chat, the accuracy of translated responses and how organisations can layer website content for different audiences. We have included these questions, together with the answers provided during the session, at the end of this write-up.
AI is influencing every stage of digital communications. It is changing how corporate information is discovered through traditional and AI search, how content is written for both people and machines, how it is published and how its performance is assessed.
Around 60% of searches are now clickless, meaning people can receive answers without continuing to the source website. This may result in lower visitor numbers, but the users who do reach the website can be more engaged, spending longer on the site and viewing more pages. AI is becoming a mediated channel through which people can find quick answers or decide to explore a subject in greater depth.
The corporate website therefore has two important roles. It must continue to provide an engaging and informative experience for people who visit it, while also publishing content in a way that makes the organisation visible to AI search engines. Analytics must similarly expand beyond activity within the website to consider performance across the wider digital ecosystem.
AI should not necessarily be viewed as a single communications channel because different audiences are using it in different ways.
Investors may access and assess information from multiple sources through their own AI platforms. Job seekers can use AI search to gather initial information about an organisation and its employment opportunities, while customers can use both AI and traditional search to identify potential organisations.
AI is therefore becoming a thread running through communications with every stakeholder group. Each channel needs to be considered in relation to the audiences it serves, creating an integrated communications approach that works for both people and AI systems.
The corporate website remains the organisation’s ultimate source of truth. However, it sits within a broader communications ecosystem that can include online reporting, results content and social media. Publishing results in HTML, for example, can help an organisation’s own narrative appear more effectively through AI and traditional search.
Communicating key stories consistently across the website, social media and other channels can also strengthen authority, reach and visibility. This points towards a more integrated, consistent and coherent approach to communications across different channels.
In feeding AI, organisations should not starve humans. Corporate communications must remain human-centred and shaped around stakeholder needs, while also being engineered, published and communicated in a way that supports AI and search visibility.
People consume information at different levels. Some want to skim a short summary, others want to explore further and some need to examine the detail. Layered content can accommodate these different behaviours, while summaries, key takeaways and frequently asked questions can make information easier to understand and improve its reach and visibility.
This is not about placing ever-increasing volumes of content online and adding to what is often termed “AI slop”. The priority should be to identify the organisation’s most important messages and publish high-quality content that provides a valuable human experience while remaining discoverable by AI.
Structured, accessible website content is central to AI visibility. AI search does not currently extract content effectively from PDFs, making webpage and HTML content particularly important. Pages should use appropriate headings, hierarchies and semantic structures to help systems understand the information they contain.
Schema markup can identify specific types of content, including quotations, statistics and FAQs. Structured data should also be moved out of images and presented in accessible HTML formats. Numbers can be placed in properly marked-up tables, while financial metrics can be published in HTML with the relevant schema sitting behind them.
Multimedia content requires similar consideration. AI cannot extract the substance of a video from the video itself, so transcripts, image descriptions and captions can help make the underlying information discoverable.
CMS platforms are also evolving to support these requirements. AI can help generate meta descriptions and schema markup, convert written articles into audio and produce first-draft translations. Human intervention is still needed because translations are not perfect, but tools can be trained to improve how specific terminology and content are handled.
Traditional website analytics remain important, but organisations increasingly need to understand performance across a wider ecosystem.
Bringing different data sources into a single intelligence platform can provide a more holistic view of performance. This can combine information such as AI search crawls and referral sessions with traditional measures including website users, sessions and views. Organisations can then examine each area in more detail and turn the resulting insight into action.
Data from different systems and firewalls can reveal which AI tools are accessing the website and which content they are scraping. This provides insight into the information being extracted for AI responses and training data, helping organisations understand how AI systems see their content.
Additional tools can identify organisations visiting the website and the information they view. For an investor relations team, this could help show whether current or potential investors are accessing results, reports or capital markets day information.
Organisations can also assess their AI readiness from several perspectives: whether static and dynamic content is available to AI, how effectively it is crafted and the extent to which it is marked up, encoded and structured. Together, these lenses provide a clearer picture of how a corporate website is performing within AI search.
AI chat is beginning to emerge within corporate websites, creating an experience that allows users to have a conversation with the site rather than navigating through multiple pages to find information.
Black Sun has developed AIVIA, a natural language assistant that can be embedded into a corporate website. Users can ask questions through voice or text, with AIVIA searching the website’s content, retrieving the relevant information and providing a natural language response based only on information available on the site. The experience can also operate in multiple languages.
For users, this creates an always-available experience that makes information easier to access. People can refine their questions, explore a subject in greater depth and receive information in a form they understand. Because AIVIA accesses only content within the website, responses remain grounded in the organisation’s published information.
For organisations, AI chat can improve stakeholder engagement and increase efficiency by enabling visitors to find information without contacting the organisation directly. It can also strengthen perceptions of the brand and its digital leadership.
One of the most valuable benefits of AI chat is the data it generates. Corporate websites can receive around 200 chat queries a day, demonstrating the potential utility of this type of experience.
Organisations can review the questions users ask, the answers the website provides and the sources cited in those answers. This can reveal where content needs to be refined, whether the right pages are being recommended and whether users feel they have received a helpful response.
These insights can be used to improve the content and structure of the website. Strengthening the underlying content can also provide a wider benefit by improving AI and SEO visibility beyond the chat experience itself.
AI is not only changing how corporate websites work today. It is also beginning to reshape what organisations will need from their digital communications in the years ahead. From changing discovery and audience behaviours to more connected content, richer experiences and broader performance measurement, several trends are starting to emerge.
As discovery becomes increasingly mediated by AI, corporate websites are evolving to support both direct visitors and the systems people use to find information. This makes an organisation’s key messages, priority content and the way that content is published increasingly important.
Traditional SEO is evolving into AI optimisation, while websites are likely to become more conversational. Content may be presented in smaller, more focused components, supported by summaries and FAQs that make information easier for people and AI systems to understand.
More performance information and high-level financial data may also be published online so it is visible through different discovery channels. However, this should not mean adding content indiscriminately. Additional information should support the organisation’s priority positions and the subjects that matter most to it.
First-party data will become more important too. Encouraging visitors to sign up for alerts can help organisations maintain a direct relationship with their audiences and retain ownership of the dialogue rather than relying entirely on AI-mediated interactions.
Audience behaviours continue to change, with people consuming information through video, text, audio and other formats. AI technologies are making it easier for organisations to provide these different content experiences.
Layered content will become increasingly important as organisations serve skimmers, waders and divers. This requires a clearer understanding of different audience needs and behaviours so content can be segmented and structured appropriately. Quality matters more than volume, particularly when organisations are seeking to build trust and establish authority around their priority topics.
In the future AI could also support more personalised experiences. Organisations may be able to provide targeted content based on an individual’s search query. AI chat, AI search overviews, audio versions of articles and multimedia formats can help the website add value beyond the information already available through external AI results.
The ability to understand and analyse audience behaviours can then help organisations further enrich the website experience.
Content is becoming more modular and distributed across channels. Information from a corporate report can be adapted into HTML for the website, developed into infographics or video for social media and reused in different formats to amplify key messages.
This approach requires rich, authoritative and evidence-based content focused on the subjects that matter most to the organisation. It also makes governance and historical content management increasingly important. Archives need to be managed carefully so AI systems do not confuse outdated information about leadership, directors or performance with the organisation’s current position.
Technology platforms are likely to become more aggregator-based, with the ability to ingest information from sources such as Word documents and SharePoint environments, interpret and tag that content and prepare it for publication. The same platforms may then support distribution across multiple channels.
AI tools within a CMS can also help assess content quality and use audience personas to consider how different stakeholder groups may perceive the information before it is published.
Performance measurement is moving beyond website and social media analytics. Integrated intelligence platforms can bring together information about how different audiences use the website, how AI systems crawl and scrape its content and whether the organisation is visible, discoverable and cited as a source.
Human-focused measures will continue to matter. Reputation analysis, user perception and sentiment can provide a richer, stakeholder-led view of performance and help organisations drive continuous improvement.
Black Sun supports organisations in preparing their corporate websites and digital communications for an AI-influenced environment through:
AI authority analysis: Assessing how an organisation appears in AI across the topics that matter most to it, how effectively its website is structured technically for AI visibility and how it currently performs against priority search prompts.
AIVIA: Bringing conversational AI into the corporate website through a natural language assistant that can respond to typed or spoken questions in multiple languages. AIVIA retrieves information from the website and provides responses grounded in the organisation’s published content, helping stakeholders access information more easily and enabling organisations to understand the questions their audiences are asking. The resulting insight can be used to refine website content, structure and user experience while supporting broader AI and SEO visibility.
Digital strategy: Helping organisations develop a digital strategy that responds to changing audience behaviours, emerging technologies and the increasing role of AI within stakeholder communications.
To find out more, please contact:
Abbie Dixon, Business Development Manager - Digital
adixon@blacksun-global.com
Does the chat respond in different languages?
Yes. If it is set up correctly, the chat can provide multilingual responses.
What do you mean by layering content and messages according to different audiences throughout the website? Can you give a specific example?
Different audiences want to consume information at different levels. A summary at the top of a page can serve someone who wants to skim the key information and can also support AI visibility. Other visitors may want to read the full article or listen to the content while doing something else. The experience should therefore provide different layers for those who want a quick overview and those who want to explore the subject in greater depth.
A sustainability section, for example, could present highlights and key performance metrics against targets for summary readers. It could then provide deeper tables covering particular topics and year-by-year performance for audiences requiring more detail, while making that information available to AI search and ESG raters and rankers. The deeper information should be published without disrupting the overall human experience.
You mentioned the AI chat can respond in different languages. How accurate are the translations and responses?
The multilingual responses have been highly accurate and effective. However, particular turns of phrase or expressions preferred by a brand can require additional training. These terms can be loaded into the tool and prioritised in its responses, so some training may be needed for specific content.
About Black Sun
Black Sun Global is a stakeholder advisory and engagement agency that's been driving transformation and positive change for ambitious brands for more than 20 years. With deep expertise in disclosure and reporting, ESG, sustainability, and digital engagement, we reshape how organisations connect with customers, investors, employees, and the wider world.
We are trusted partners to some of the most influential global organisations, sparking innovation and sustainable performance through our strategic insights, partnerships, and proprietary technologies.
As founders of the Positive Change Group, we are on a mission to create a new kind of stakeholder relations partner. Our world-class specialists work closely with executive leadership teams to protect reputations, inspire trust, and promote responsible business practices - building resilience and long-term value in a rapidly changing world.
For more information, please visit: www.blacksun-global.com
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