Your Intranet Doesn’t Need More Content. It Needs More Trusted Answers.

Key takeaways

• Finding an intranet page isn’t the same as knowing it’s current, authoritative and relevant to you.
• Employees need three things from an intranet: a relevant answer, quickly, with enough context to trust it.
• Search can improve access, but it can’t resolve duplication, unclear ownership or outdated content on its own.
• Employees search in the language of the task in front of them, while organisations often publish around internal structures.
• Becoming answer-ready improves the employee experience now and strengthens the foundations for Copilot and AI later.

How confident are you that employees can find the right information on your intranet? 

It sounds like a simple question, but there’s an important difference between finding information and feeling confident that you’ve found the right answer. Most organisations have no shortage of content. Their intranets hold policies, process guides, forms, templates, departmental pages, project sites and years of news. The harder question is whether an employee can work out which piece of information is current, authoritative and relevant to them. 

Employees rarely visit the intranet for the pleasure of browsing it. They usually have something to do, whether that’s booking leave, checking a policy, reporting an incident or finding the right person to contact. If the intranet gives them six plausible results and leaves them to decide which one is trustworthy, it hasn’t really answered the question. 

A healthy intranet should not be judged by how much information it contains. It should be judged by whether people can find the answer they need, understand it and act with confidence.

‘It’s on the Intranet’ Isn’t a Complete Answer

We’ve all been in the meeting where somebody asks a straightforward question and is told, ‘It’s on the intranet.’ That’s supposed to close the conversation, but it often starts another one. Where on the intranet? Is that still the latest version? Does it apply to everyone?

This is where findability and confidence begin to separate. An employee may find a page in seconds and still check it with a colleague, save a local copy or ask in Teams next time. Those workarounds make sense for the individual, but across an organisation they create duplicated effort and weaken the intranet’s role as a dependable source of information.

The employee experience isn’t complete when a result appears on screen. It’s complete when the employee has enough confidence to use the answer and get on with their day.

Employees Need Relevance, Speed & Confidence

When people look for help at work, they make three quick judgements: does this answer apply to me, can I reach it without sifting through menus and near matches, and can I trust it enough to act? Relevance, speed and confidence work together. If one is missing, the experience starts to fall apart.

Relevance means the answer reflects the employee’s situation where that matters. Speed is the time and effort required to reach a useful outcome, not simply the loading time of a page. Confidence comes from signals like a clear owner, a visible review date, consistent language and a single authoritative version.

Navigation and search are easier to see and redesign, so they often receive more attention. Confidence is built less visibly through ownership, review and careful content management, but it’s often the part that determines whether employees come back.

Employees Don’t Think in Departments

Most intranets reflect how the organisation is structured. HR manages one area, IT another and Internal Communications another. This makes sense for ownership and publishing, but it’s rarely how an employee frames the task in front of them.

An employee wants to know how to book parental leave, order equipment or claim an expense. They’re not thinking about which function owns the process. They’re using the language of their question, while the intranet may be using the language of the organisational chart.

We encounter this regularly in discovery work with clients of all shapes and sizes. Content owners naturally describe information through the lens of their expertise, while employees use everyday terms and often combine topics that cross several departments. A good intranet bridges those perspectives, preserving clear ownership behind the scenes without asking employees to understand it before they can find an answer.

Our work with the University of Leeds is a useful example. Early discovery showed a fragmented landscape across multiple sites and channels, with only 24% of employees saying they could easily find the information needed to do their job. The SharePoint intranet programme used employee insight to shape how navigation and content are structured – and the number of employees who can now easily access the information they needed jumped by 74%.

Search Reveals the Content you Already Have

Search is often blamed when employees can’t reach a clear answer because that’s where the problem becomes visible. However, a search tool can only work with the content available to it. If the intranet contains several versions of a policy, an old form and a page with no active owner, better search may still present the employee with an awkward decision.

Search doesn’t create clarity; it reveals whether clarity already exists. Search design and relevance still matter, but they shouldn’t be asked to compensate for content that has no clear status. Improving the results page while leaving duplication and ownership untouched is like tidying a junk drawer by moving everything into neat compartments. It may look more organised, but you still have to sift through everything you should have cleared out.

Analytics, like SWOOP, can identify where to look. Repeated searches, zero-result queries and heavily used pages are useful signals, but they need to be read alongside employee feedback and task testing. A popular page might be valuable, or it might be the first step in a frustrating journey. The numbers point towards the conversation; they don’t replace it.

More Content is Rarely the Answer

Nobody sets out to create a confusing intranet. Confusing intranets are usually the result of sensible decisions accumulating over time. A project site is created for a real need, a document is copied for another audience, a campaign page remains live and a content owner changes role. Each decision is understandable, but together they create an estate where useful information becomes harder to distinguish from everything around it.

Publishing another explainer page can feel like the quickest response, but it may simply add another possible answer. Sometimes the more useful intervention is to consolidate, rewrite, redirect or archive.

Before you Become AI-Ready, Become Answer-Ready

There’s no shortage of discussion about AI readiness, and much of it focuses on technology, permissions, adoption and training. Those things matter, but they can distract from a more immediate question: can your intranet answer an employee’s question confidently today?

Copilot and AI agents change the route to information by allowing people to ask a question and receive a synthesised answer. They don’t remove the need for trustworthy source material. If employees would hesitate to recommend a page because it may be outdated or ambiguous, it’s reasonable to question whether that page should inform an AI-generated response.

Answer-ready is a useful goal because it’s specific enough to test and valuable even before a wider AI rollout. When important employee questions have clear, authoritative answers, the intranet works better through navigation and search today, while the same work strengthens future AI experiences.

Test a Real Question, Not the Whole Intranet

Trying to make an entire intranet perfect is a reliable way to create a large programme with no obvious starting point. A better approach is to choose one important employee question and test the full journey as though you’re a new starter.

Pick something practical and consequential, like reporting a safety incident, finding the hybrid-working policy, booking leave or applying for an internal vacancy. Begin where an employee would begin and see whether you can reach a clear answer easily. Once you’ve found the right page, look behind it as well as at it.

If the journey fails any of these checks, you’ve found a useful improvement opportunity. The answer may need a rewrite, clearer title, redirect from an old page or a conversation with the team that owns it. The remedy will vary, but the test keeps the work tied to real employee tasks.

Once the journey works, repeat the exercise with another high-value question. This offers a practical route towards better governance without beginning with a huge rulebook or treating every page as equally important. A safety procedure deserves closer attention than last year’s Christmas party news, and the governance effort should reflect that difference.

The Real Measure is Whether People can Act

Page views, search volumes and content counts all have their place, but they don’t tell you whether an employee found the right answer or completed the task. A more useful measure is whether people can reach an answer that applies to them, understand what to do next and act without checking it somewhere else.

That puts employee needs ahead of publishing volume and gives content owners a clearer purpose. Their job is not merely to keep a page live; it’s to maintain an answer people can rely on.

Your intranet probably doesn’t need another layer of content explaining where everything is. It needs fewer competing answers, clearer ownership and more confidence in the information already there. Get that right and you improve self-service, reduce avoidable questions and create a stronger foundation for Copilot and AI, all by solving a problem employees already have today.