Telstra’s communication efforts during its outage earlier this year reminded us of the importance of corporate newsrooms.
The story is straightforward: Australia’s biggest telco has long run a newsroom that publishes tech tips, cybersecurity advice and news about the company.
As corporate newsrooms go, the team does a good job. They stick to their knitting, use their own subject matter experts, and update frequently.
During the outage, as you’d expect, Telstra continuously updated the site.
But the punchline was that it wasn’t only keeping customers updated — instead, it was focused on informing Google, ChatGPT and Claude.
AI is changing comms
There’s plenty of evidence AI is changing how people get their information.
Nearly seven in 10 Google searches end without a click. AI overviews cut clicks by 58%.
That means the work of content has changed. It’s almost certainly no longer about traffic.
How to feed the AI overview
Telstra’s insight was to accept that their customers weren’t going to turn up to the newsroom, Telstra Exchange, to find out why their mobiles weren’t working.
Instead, they were going to ask Google — and Google was going to give them an AI-generated answer instead of a link.
The trick was to ensure the AI answer was right.
And that’s where the corporate newsroom showed its value.
Traffic declining
Corporate newsrooms can be difficult to justify because they don’t directly drive sales, it’s hard to prove they are working and all the current evidence shows traffic is declining as AI eats away at search.
But what they do have is years of credibility and domain authority.
That means search engines and AI systems happily pick up and relay their content.
Telstra claims its updates were informing AI overviews within minutes of publishing.
That’s a good outcome for the often unloved corporate newsroom.
Does your corporate newsroom work?
How well are your newsroom and insights pages feeding AI?
One crude test is to ask Google the same questions that your customers are asking — and see if the AI overview uses your content and references your site.
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In our experience, content that works for AI looks an awful lot like traditional journalism — a lead that answers the reader’s question, evidence from multiple sources, and a clear ‘so what?’ statement of context.
What next for corporate newsrooms?
We think that as AI disintermediates the conversation between businesses and their customers and stakeholders, ensuring your corporate newsroom is working is going to become critically important.
That means checking it’s delivering what your audience wants: frequently updated, relevant, expert-led information.
And it means less time worrying about why traffic is falling.
Just because your customers are no longer visiting your website doesn’t mean they don’t have questions.