Like any good comms leader, you’ve probably fought for the CEO reporting line at some point. And you either won it or you didn't, but either way you've been told for over a decade that where comms sits on the org chart is the barometer of strategic comms success.

But Page’s new benchmark of 179 chief communications officers says the org chart was never the right measure. Because the CEO line buys you access and protection, but it has no measurable relationship with whether you can prove what the function is worth.

If you aren’t familiar, Page is the professional association for CCOs, mostly at large companies, and the Navigator is its annual study of how the function is organized, resourced and measured. The 2026 edition, shared with members this week, was fielded in April and May.

So what does reporting to the CEO actually get you? Executive committee membership 73 percent of the time, against 30 percent for everyone else. You'll also have seen fewer headcount cuts in the past year, 21 percent versus 36 percent. So if you're making the case for the reporting line, that's still a solid case.

But here's what it doesn't get you.

When Page asked CCOs how confident they were that they could demonstrate the business value of communications, the CEO reporting line made no statistically significant difference, and neither did executive committee membership.

What did was size and money. About 73 percent of CCOs running teams of more than 50 reported high confidence against 52 percent with smaller teams, and 71 percent of those who called their function adequately resourced were highly confident against 53 percent who didn't. Page's said that the most confident CCOs "were characterized less by reporting relationship than by the scale and perceived resource adequacy of the function."

Now, confidence is self-reported, so a bigger team may feel surer without measuring anything better but the pattern matches the CCO most of us have met, the one with the CEO's ear, more consigliere than data analyst, and a team of eight who gets asked "what did we get for that?" and has nothing to point at but coverage.

It’s the measurement problem (again)

On the things comms controls, we're disciplined. 74 percent of us track social engagement, 64 percent track employee engagement, 55 percent track overall brand strength. But on the thing the board cares about most, we're nearly absent.

Only 19.6 percent of functions formally track their own commercial impact, and only 23.5 percent report it. By commercial impact I mean revenue or leads you can tie to something comms did, and the low number isn’t laziness. Drawing that line in a way a CFO would accept is one of the hardest measurement problems in the entire industry and has been for years which is exactly why most of us struggle.

Page calls this “a potential credibility gap” but I’d call it a bluff. It’s the question a CFO eventually asks, and four in five of us don’t have the answer.

Interstingly, nearly three-quarters of CCOs have been told by their executives to adopt more AI, but a third aren't measuring its value at all and the ones who are are mostly counting time saved. When it comes to whether AI has impacted comms org charts, 2.6 percent redeployed a role because of AI, 2.6 percent eliminated one, 0.9 percent created one. So we're adopting a tool under pressure from above with the same measurement muscle we already didn't have.

Which is why I'd read the Microsoft news through this lens

Two weeks ago, after storied CCO Frank Shaw announced he’s leaving the helm at year-end, Microsoft moved its comms team out of marketing and under Brad Smith, its vice chair and president, who runs the company’s legal, public policy and government relations group, with the next CCO expected to report to Smith too.

The conversation among communicators was to ask whether that's a promotion or a demotion. Page's appendix suggests it's neither, just a different trade altogether. Executive committee membership runs 73 percent for CCOs under the CEO, 56 percent under the COO, 46 percent under a corporate or external affairs chief, 30 percent under a general counsel or a CMO, 5 percent under a CHRO. Lines are going to diverge, because the sensible place for the function is wherever the company’s exposure lives, and for Microsoft that’s regulatory.

I’d go even further and say the box matters less than we’ve all pretended. It changes what you hear and when but it doesn’t change the work in front of you, which is the same in legal, marketing or the CEO’s office: build the method that shows what comms contributed to the overall business strategy.

Build the method before the budget review does it for you

The budget review is coming sooner for some of us than others. Organizations over 20,000 employees were more than twice as likely as smaller ones to have cut comms headcount this year, 44 percent versus 17 percent, and budget, 45 percent versus 20 percent. The headcount pattern didn’t exist in 2025. So if you run a large function, the question of what comms is worth is not hypothetical. Someone in finance is going to ask it, if they haven’t already, and the answer you give will be the one you’ve already built or the one you improvise.

So the thing I’d want to be able to say at the next quarterly review is: “Every business objective in this deck has a comms KPI under it, with a measurement method the CFO has reviewed and signed off on.” If you can’t say that yet, don’t try to boil the ocean. Pick one number, the one closest to the company’s most important business objectives, take it to the finance team, and ask them to work with you on how you’ll calculate comms’ share of it. You’ll come back with a narrower claim than you wanted but it’ll also be the first number in your deck that finance would defend for you, and that does more for your standing than any reporting line because the next time someone asks what comms is worth, the answer comes from finance, not from you.

The reporting line still matters because it got you into the room where the most consequential decisions are made and it may be protecting your team right now. But Page’s data say the room was never the thing that made the function credible. What you can prove once you’re in it is, and only one in five of us can prove much of anything to a CFO. For 2027 planning that’s the gap to close first, ahead of the AI roadmap, ahead of the next structure review, ahead of the next conversation about who you report to. Get one number the CFO will stand behind, and the reporting line just becomes a supporting detail.