Almost every official statement issued by a major Australian organisation today is functionally invisible to the systems that now define public understanding.

It does not matter if the announcement came from the Prime Minister, a Big Four bank, or the CEO of BHP. If it is not structured for artificial intelligence, it is not part of the story. And increasingly, AI is the story.

We are in an era where search engines are being replaced by answer engines. A time where content not written for machine readability is simply excluded from the modern knowledge base. And in that monumental shift, 99% of Australian institutions have already fallen behind.
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The New Gatekeepers

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Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and countless enterprise agents are rapidly changing how information is found, ranked, and synthesised. These systems do not index pages the way traditional search engines did. They form conclusions. They select a single, authoritative answer. And in doing so, they decide what is true.

Gartner predicts that traditional search traffic will drop by 25% by 2026. This is not just a shift in browsing habits; it is a fundamental rewrite of the information economy. In this new model, there is no second page of results. There is only the answer. If your official statement is not structured to be seen, parsed, and trusted by these AI systems, it will not be part of the public knowledge they create.

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Why You’re Being Ignored

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The strategic communications playbook has failed to keep up with this technological reality. A typical corporate statement today is drafted, checked by legal, and then uploaded as a PDF or pasted into a content management system that has no structured data. To a machine, it might as well be a photograph of a newspaper clipping—legible, but without context or authority.

When content lacks the necessary metadata, semantic cues, and schema, AI systems treat it as unreliable noise. They reach for clearer, more trustworthy sources instead, such as media articles that have been properly formatted, think tank summaries with clean code, or even competitor commentary. Your message is not just missed; it is actively overwritten by a more legible source.

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What We Found

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Bushnote conducted a comprehensive audit of 120 official statements from Australia’s most powerful entities – across government, finance, mining, telecommunications, and technology. The results were a stark confirmation of a systemic and costly oversight.

• Less than 1% used NewsArticle schema to signal trust and authorship to AI platforms.
• More than 50% were published primarily as PDFs, trapping valuable data in a format hostile to automated extraction.
• Nearly all lacked a clear content hierarchy or machine-readable quotes that an AI could reliably cite.

What’s at Stake

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This is not a technical problem. It is a crisis of narrative sovereignty, with three distinct and damaging consequences.

1. Hijacked Intent. If your official statement is unreadable to an AI, the system will substitute whatever is. That might be a journalist’s opinionated take, a competitor’s sharp analysis, or a random blog post with cleaner code. Your message is not just missed; it is completely replaced.
2. Automated Misinterpretation. Journalists, policy analysts, and investors increasingly use AI to summarise complex material. When the AI skips your original source because it is indecipherable, your story is told through the lens of proxies. The AI's summary of their interpretation becomes the new source of truth.
3. The Great Forgetting. Each time an AI learns from another AI’s summary, the original data degrades. This recursive loop creates what we call "model pollution," which is the slow, systemic erosion of verifiable truth until all that remains is a blurry, self-referential consensus.

The Architecture of Visibility

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But in this systemic brittleness lies an extraordinary opportunity. The system still rewards substance, but that substance must now be presented in a new language. The advantage has shifted to those who can inject trust, provenance, and structure directly into the information supply chain. This is not about writing for robots; it is about architecting your communications so they become foundational knowledge.

Consider the anatomy of a statement built for this new reality. Its headline would be factual and unambiguous. Its key pronouncements would be wrapped in semantic code that acts as a flare for any AI. Its core data would be presented in clean, scannable lists. Most critically, the entire document would be wrapped in a digital passport, a NewsArticle schema, that explicitly tells the system: "I am an authoritative, primary source from the organisation I claim to be."

This is not a technical exercise. It is the new art of strategic communication.

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From Message to Object: The New Press Release

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To make this tangible, here is an example of what a press release built for AI visibility actually looks like. It is not just a message; it is an object, designed for discovery.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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Bushnote Audit Declares 99% of Australian Corporate & Government Press Releases Functionally Invisible to AI

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CANBERRA, 26 July 2025 – Strategic communications firm Bushnote today released a damning report revealing that the vast majority of official statements from Australia's leading organisations are not structured for modern AI, rendering them invisible to the next generation of search and information tools.

The audit, which analysed 120 press releases from political parties, government departments, and ASX-listed companies, found a systemic failure to implement the basic metadata and structural formatting required for AI platforms to parse and trust information.

"Organisations are spending millions on communications, only to whisper their most important messages into a digital hurricane," said James Dore, Marketing Director at Bushnote. "They are meticulously crafting statements that the new gatekeepers of information literally cannot read. By failing to adapt, they are ceding control of their own narrative to third-party interpretations and, frankly, to their competitors."

Key Findings

Lack of Structured Data
Less than 1 percent of audited press releases included schema markup such as NewsArticle, which AI systems rely on to identify authoritative information.

Overuse of PDF Format
More than half of the reviewed press releases were published as PDFs — a format that AI platforms cannot reliably interpret or summarise.

Poor Content Hierarchy
Most releases lacked semantic structure, including proper heading levels and section tagging, making them difficult for AI to navigate or prioritise.

Bushnote’s Response

In response to the findings, Bushnote has launched an AI Visibility Audit to help organisations bring their public communications in line with emerging AI and search standards. The service ensures official statements are not only compelling for human readers but also accessible, interpretable and indexable by AI.

About Bushnote

Bushnote is a strategic and marketing agency that blends behavioural insight, data science and narrative expertise. We help influential organisations solve complex communication challenges and ensure their message is seen, understood and surfaced — across both traditional media and emerging AI ecosystems.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did the Bushnote audit examine?
The review analysed 120 official press releases from major Australian institutions, including Qantas, BHP, the Commonwealth Bank, the Prime Minister’s Office, Telstra and The Treasury.

What was the main finding?
Ninety-nine percent of the releases were not machine-readable. They lacked the schema, structure and metadata that modern AI tools require to index and summarise authoritative information.

Why does this matter?
AI systems increasingly shape how information is surfaced and understood. If your official statement cannot be read by AI, it will not be included in AI-generated summaries — and your message will be defined by others.

Which platforms are affected?
This includes Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT with browsing, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity and other generative search or answer platforms.

How is Bushnote addressing this?
Bushnote has integrated AI-optimised publishing and structured data strategy into its communications workflow. Our approach ensures clients maintain control over how their message is found, framed and understood.

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Media Contact:
James Dore
Strategy Director
info@bushnote.com
https://www.bushnote.com

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This is a solvable problem. It demands a shift in thinking: from mere message creation to deliberate information architecture. Strategic clarity, discoverability, and influence can be restored with small but profound changes to workflow and technology.

The default narrative is currently being written by others. But for those who can inject credibility and structure into the system, the next era of discovery offers a remarkable strategic upside. If you are responsible for how your organisation is seen, summarised, or surfaced, the time to act is now.

Methodology Note

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The Bushnote Audit was conducted in July 2025, analysing 120 publicly available press releases from a representative sample of ASX100 companies, federal government departments, political parties, and major think tanks. Releases were assessed against a multi-tiered AI-readiness framework which included:

‍1) Format: HTML webpage vs. PDF.

‍2) Structure: Use of hierarchical headings (H1, H2) and semantic tags (<blockquote>).

‍3) Schema: The presence of validated NewsArticle structured data. A release was deemed 'functionally invisible' if it failed the gold standard test of having valid NewsArticle schema.

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