Best of Q1 2026 Earnings: How Companies Are Adapting to Communicate More Effectively
We’re back with our Best of Earnings Season series, this time for Q1 2026.
As always, we looked at what companies are trying, refining, or doing differently around earnings communications. This quarter, what stood out was how companies are adapting their formats and channels to reach investors more effectively.
Leaders are leaning on long-form content to tell the more nuanced earnings story
Short LinkedIn posts, earnings recap videos, and infographics are useful for getting the highlights out. But some earnings stories need more room, especially when the company is explaining something more nuanced, something that needs real deliberation and discussion to land.
That is where longer formats help. They give leaders room to explain the thinking behind the quarter, not just repeat the numbers. They also reach audiences that traditional earnings channels do not.
A LinkedIn article or a podcast episode is part of how retail investors, employees, and even customers already consume content. These formats are simply more approachable than a 90-minute earnings call.
A few great examples stood out this quarter.
Duolingo’s CFO, Jillian Munson joined After Earnings podcast (YouTube channel) to explain why Duolingo is prioritizing long-term growth over near-term monetization. The company is mission-driven, believes it can teach billions of people around the world, and is reinvesting profits to go after that larger opportunity rather than optimizing for short-term returns.
That kind of trade-off requires patience from investors, and it is hard to explain in a short recap. The 25-minute podcast gave her room to walk through the logic in a way that builds real understanding.
Zillow’s CEO Jeremy Wacksman took a different route after Q1, using a LinkedIn article to explain the strategy behind the quarter. It is a smart use of long-form content: it reaches retail investors, employees, and anyone following the company on LinkedIn who would never sit through the full earnings call.
ZIGUP’s IR newsletter is the IR-led version of this idea. It is more geared toward shareholders, analysts, and traditional investor audiences, but the job is similar: giving investors more context between formal reporting moments through business updates, IR activity, a CEO interview, and FAQs.
Takeaway for IROs: when the story requires nuance or patience, longer formats in approachable channels can help leadership explain the quarter to audiences the earnings call never reaches.
IR websites are becoming part of the earnings story
According to the Brunswick Group’s 2026 U.S. Investor Survey, 54% of institutional investors say AI outputs are now an important part of their research. Nearly half are skipping earnings calls entirely, relying on AI-generated summaries instead. The question for IR teams: is your website making it easy for those tools to find clear, company-owned answers?
Unilever’s Q1 2026 results page is a good example. In addition to the traditional earnings materials, Unilever built a dedicated HTML page for the quarter with headline metrics, CEO commentary, charts, and supporting materials all in one place. It is structured in a way that makes it straightforward for an LLM to crawl through and surface accurate answers.
The page also includes an FAQ section at the bottom that anticipates the kinds of questions investors ask about the quarter: how did the company perform, how did it grow, and what drove the results?
It works well for human readers who want quick answers. It is also likely useful for AI tools, since the page is already organized around the way investors search.
We are seeing more IR teams move in this direction. Here are a few examples:
- Deutsche Telekom publishes quarterly results in HTML (on their website itself), so management commentary, key figures, and segment details are easily accessible to AI.
- ZIGUP has added an AI chatbot to its investor site that lets visitors ask questions across the company’s public materials.
- Vodafone puts the “why invest” case upfront, so AI (and investors) can articulate the core thesis.
This is a “developing” topic. We plan to talk more about it in an upcoming issue.
What else resonated with earnings comms this quarter?
We saw a couple of good examples of videos, this time from CFOs. We also saw more companies opening the call to retail investor questions.
General Motors and Nasdaq used CFO-led videos to explain results quickly. Paul Jacobson (GM) kept it simple with a whiteboard, three takeaways, and a clear explanation of what drove the quarter. Sarah Youngwood (NDAQ) used a short video to break down Nasdaq’s Q1 results in under a minute.
Goldman Sachs estimates retail investors now directly hold 38% of all U.S. stocks. Palantir and Tesla are using platforms like Say Technologies to give them a direct voice on the earnings call: investors submit questions in advance, the most upvoted ones get read live during Q&A, and management answers them directly.
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