Adobe’s Digital Government Index 2025: a quick summary
Adobe's Digital Strategy Group assesses how well Australian government agencies deliver online services. The Digital Government Index is now in its fourth year, and the 2025 report covers 15 federal, state and territory websites, including , Services , the , and all eight state and territory government websites.
The assessment scores each agency across three core dimensions of digital maturity:
- Customer experience: How simple and seamless the online experience is for users completing tasks on both mobile and desktop
- Site performance: How fast, stable and authoritative the website is across devices
- Digital self-service: How accessible and navigable services are for all users, including those with diverse needs or who rely on assistive technologies
Each dimension gets a score out of 100, and the three are averaged to produce a single DGI score. Agencies are then placed on a maturity scale ranging from Nascent (below 60), through Basic, Emerging and Advanced, up to Cutting-edge (90 to 100).
This year's report also introduces two new digital enablers alongside the core index:
- An AI-readiness assessment, which measures how well government websites can be found, trusted and used by both people and AI systems.
- A personalisation capability measure that assesses how well agencies tailor experiences for individual citizens across different stages of their journey.
The methodology combines user testing with 300 participants, third-party tools such as Google PageSpeed, SEMrush, axeDevTools, as well as manual analysis.
Australia’s national DGI score
Australia's national DGI score for 2025 is 69.4, up from 67.7 in 2024.
This score is a reversal of last year's slight dip, driven mainly by improvements in site performance and digital self-service, while customer experience remains stable. However, the pace of overall improvement has slowed noticeably. The score sat at 58.0 when the index launched in 2022, jumped to 68.4 in 2023 and has moved in small increments since. For the third year running, Australia sits in the middle of the Emerging maturity band (70-80).
Globally, Australia ranks just behind the United Kingdom, which holds the top spot in 2025. Across the Asia Pacific region, ranked highest among all agencies assessed, with Services , the , the and the NSW also placing in the top 10. The 2025 assessment covered 115 government agency websites worldwide.
One factor behind Australia's steady improvement is the DTA's Digital Experience Policy , which mandates standards for the design and delivery of digital services. The policy's Digital Service took effect in July 2024, with the Inclusion, Access and Performance following from January 2025. Chris Fechner, CEO of the DTA, in the DGI , acknowledged the DXP's influence in improving index measures while flagging AI adoption as the next focus area for policy development.
How agencies performed across the three dimensions
The DGI scores agencies across three dimensions, and each moved differently in 2025:
- Customer experience (65.9): This was the least-changed dimension since the index began. Users rate the early stages of their journey (finding the agency, first impressions) most highly, but satisfaction drops as they approach completing a transaction.
The report's new personalisation measure tells a similar story. Agencies scored an average of 48.8 out of 100 for personalisation capability, with the strongest results in early engagement stages like site search and geo-based content, and the weakest at the transaction and post-transaction end.
Only 8% of citizens receive personalised follow-up after completing a service interaction. Services is highlighted as a standout, with users consistently reporting clear, relevant and tailored information. Site performance (65.7, up from 62.8): Mobile site speed improved by 23%, closing a persistent gap with desktop. Site authority also lifted, suggesting agencies are consolidating fragmented microsites and strengthening content. But site health declined for the second consecutive year, recording its lowest result since the index started. myGov recorded the highest site performance score of all agencies, with a site health score of 90.
Digital self-service (76.7): This was the strongest of the three dimensions. Language translation improved, with five agencies scoring a perfect 100. Accessibility conformance remains high but has edged down for a second year. Content readability is the clear weak point, with scores ranging from 9 to 74 and an average below 50. Only five agencies passed that benchmark.
What stands out across all three dimensions is that the areas where agencies have made the most progress (site speed, language translation) tend to be technically scoped and measurable. The areas where progress has stalled (customer experience through the full journey, content readability, site health) are harder to fix because they cut across teams, content processes and design practices. Sustained improvement from here will take more than technical fixes.
State and territory rankings
Five of the eight Australian states and territories improved their DGI score in 2025, and the overall picture is one of convergence. Only four percentage points separate the top five, compared to a wider spread in previous years. Digital maturity is levelling out across Australia as more states invest in both policy and practical improvements to citizen services.
NSW retained the top spot for the third year running. The state achieved perfect scores for both accessibility conformance and language translation in 2025, offering automatic website translation in over 70 languages. This reflects a strategy-level commitment to inclusion. The NSW Government launched its Digital in October 2024, with accessibility as a central mission, and followed it with NSW's first Digital Inclusion in May 2025.
The ACT and Queensland recorded the strongest improvements in DGI scores this year. The ACT jumped from fourth to second on the back of a 6.4% lift in customer experience. Queensland reversed a previous downward trend, climbing to fourth place after a 13.2% boost in site performance from mobile and desktop speed improvements.
Unfortunately, Western Australia dropped from second to fifth. Digital self-service fell 7%, largely due to a steep decline in content readability, and site performance dropped nearly 4% as site health and authority weakened. Speed gains alone weren't enough to offset those losses.
AI readiness in the Australian government
The most significant addition to the 2025 report is a new AI-readiness assessment. As AI-driven search tools reshape how citizens find and access government information, agencies that aren't optimised for this shift risk losing visibility to less reliable sources.
The average AI-readiness score across all assessed agencies is 61.7, with a wide spread from 51.1 to 73.1. The assessment measures three pillars:
- Trust and authority (67.5): This was the strongest pillar. Government sites score well on credibility and reliability, which aligns with the authoritative nature of public sector information.
- Technology structure and discoverability (63.8): Agencies perform well on crawlability, meaning content is technically accessible to AI systems. But AI visibility remains low, so that content isn't being surfaced effectively in AI-generated responses.
- Brand and content relevance (53.8): This was the weakest area. Limited traffic referrals from large language models (LLMs) and low keyword demand suggest government information isn't reaching citizens through AI-assisted channels, even when the content itself is trustworthy.
The report notes that agencies providing open, unauthenticated services tend to score higher on AI readiness, since their content is more easily discoverable by LLMs. Agencies operating behind secure logins will naturally score lower on specific indicators, though that doesn't reflect a lower level of overall digital maturity.
To improve AI readiness, the report recommends practical steps including schema markups, faster load speeds, semantic HTML tags, clean navigation structures, descriptive alt tagging and improved content readability. Many of these overlap with existing accessibility and site performance best practices, which means agencies already investing in those areas have a head start.
Salsa’s Digital take
The 2025 DGI confirms what we've observed working with government agencies: the early gains from platform migrations and basic accessibility improvements have been captured. What's left is harder. Improving end-to-end citizen journeys, maintaining site health, and making content genuinely readable are problems that cut across teams and processes, not just technology. The introduction of AI readiness as a formal measure is the most significant shift in this year's report, signalling that government content needs to be structured for machines as well as people.
This aligns closely with Salsa's work in Rules as where we help agencies turn legislation, regulations, and policies into machine-readable code using open-source tools like OpenFisca. One of the outcomes of this work is to create a better citizen experience. We’re currently also working in the Rules as Code space to leverage AI while also ensuring the all-important human in the loop.
The DGI report's emphasis on schema markups, semantic HTML and machine-readable metadata also aligns with some of the work Salsa is doing with our clients in this space. Agencies that invest in making their content structured and interpretable by AI systems aren't just improving search visibility; they're building the foundation for more personalised, trustworthy and automated service delivery.
As AI readiness becomes a bigger factor in future assessments, we'll continue partnering with government agencies to strengthen their digital foundations, improve content structure and close the gap between trust and discoverability.