What CEOs got wrong about going quiet
A new study from Golin tracked the public communications of the top 250 Fortune 500 CEOs across 2025. The headline number is hard to ignore: those CEOs collectively lost nearly 3 trillion earned media impressions compared to 2024. Ninety percent of that came from pulling back on traditional media, events, and industry associations.
They went quiet. And it cost them.
The study is about external communications, but everything in it applies to what employees experience inside the organization. The dynamics are the same. When leaders disengage from public discourse, competitors and critics fill the vacuum. When leaders disengage internally, employees fill it with rumor, frustration, and cynicism - and the trust gap that creates is one internal comms ends up carrying.
Internal communicators already know this. What the Golin data does is put a number on it.
The silence problem is bigger than it looks
The study's authors describe what happened in 2025 as "the great retreat." CEOs, facing political and economic uncertainty, chose to reduce their footprint rather than engage more carefully.
The instinct makes sense. Less said, less wrong. But the data shows it doesn't work that way. Golin found that the CEOs who maintained or grew their presence outperformed peers on shareholder returns by 2-3x. Strategic visibility wasn't a reputational nicety; it was a business decision with measurable outcomes.
Inside organizations, the same math applies, even if you can't run the same regression. When employees don't hear from leadership during turbulent periods, they don't assume things are fine. They assume things are being hidden.
The AI communications trap
The study found that 86% of Index CEOs now reference AI in their public communications. But the ones who framed AI primarily around workforce reductions took a significant reputation hit. The ones who anchored their AI narrative in product innovation, customer outcomes, or reskilling fared considerably better.
This is a direct brief for IC teams.
If your CEO is talking about AI publicly in ways that don't match what employees are being told internally, that gap is your problem to close. Before drafting any internal AI communication, ask your CEO directly: what do you want employees to believe about AI's role here? The answer will tell you whether you're writing communication or damage control.
When the external message is "AI is helping us grow" and the internal experience is "AI is why we're cutting headcount," employees notice. Research backs this up - 73% of workers say sender identity is the top factor in whether they trust a message. A CEO who says one thing publicly and another thing internally isn't just inconsistent. They're a trust liability. And they talk.
The external communications your leaders put out aren't separate from your internal comms strategy. They're part of it.
CEO silence on societal issues doesn't reduce risk
One of the sharper findings from the study: 68% of Fortune 250 CEOs had DEI, climate, immigration, or political alignment surface as a significant factor in their public engagement in 2025. And Golin's conclusion is blunt: silence doesn't build a shield. It just moves the risk somewhere else.
For IC, this matters because employees are watching what their CEO says (or doesn't say) externally and comparing it to what they're hearing internally. If your CEO has retreated from a public commitment to DEI while your organization is still running DEI programming, employees feel that inconsistency before you ever have to articulate it.
The study describes the winning external model as "engagement without endorsement" -- framing policy-adjacent decisions in business language rather than political language. That's a reasonable approach. But it only works if the internal narrative is consistent with it.
What the study is actually telling IC practitioners
Golin's data shows that the CEOs who performed best in 2025 used what they call "surgical stakeholder engagement" -- fewer, more targeted interactions, focused on top-tier outlets and LinkedIn rather than volume and vanity metrics.
Internal communicators should be hearing that and thinking about their CEO's internal communications strategy the same way.
How often is your CEO communicating directly to employees? Is it reactive or planned? Does it track with what's happening externally? When they do communicate, is it specific enough to be useful, or is it generic reassurance that employees will see through immediately?
The best external CEO communicators, according to this study, stayed consistent between their words and their actions. That bar doesn't get easier to clear internally. If anything, it's harder, because employees have direct line of sight to the gap.
If you're advising your CEO on internal communications, the Golin data gives you something useful: a mirror. Map their internal cadence against what they're doing externally. Look for the gaps - topics they're addressing publicly but going quiet on inside, channels they're active on externally but absent from internally, moments where the external narrative got ahead of the internal one. That mapping is the brief. Start there.
Read the full Golin CEO Impact Index report here.