A structural rebuild for the site every American is required to use at least once a year, built around finishing a task instead of finding a form
This is my approach to redesigning IRS.gov.
Number 9 in this series is the one site nobody chooses to visit. That is exactly what makes it a useful test case. WebMD earns its traffic through search and concern. IRS.gov earns its traffic through legal obligation, which means the usual growth-and-engagement lens does not apply here. The only question that matters is whether someone can finish what they came to do.
Why it qualifies
IRS.gov receives roughly 3 billion page views annually, making it one of the highest-trafficked destinations in government or finance, and it currently ranks fifth in the Government category and inside the top 1,000 sites globally. Recent monthly traffic has run in the range of 50 million visits, with an average session length approaching ten minutes, which for a task-based utility site is a long time to still be on the page. This is a site operating at massive, mandatory scale, which is precisely the top 10% territory this series looks for.
To its credit, the IRS has not ignored the problem. A 2024 initiative rewrote twenty key pages into an interlinked format aimed at first-time filers, and those redesigned pages drew over 100 million views in their first month alone, becoming more than a quarter of the site’s total traffic. That is real evidence the underlying content team knows what good looks like. The redesign in this piece is about extending that same instinct structurally, across the whole site, not critiquing a team that has already shown it can do the work.
What is actually wrong
The site is organized by department, not by task. Someone who wants to check a refund, someone who owes a payment, and someone starting a business are all funneled through the same dense top-level navigation before finding their actual path. A nine-minute average session on a task-based site is a sign people are hunting, not reading.
Identity verification is a separate, jarring product. A large share of visitor traffic flows out to id.me before it can return to complete anything requiring login, which means the most sensitive, highest-stakes part of the experience, proving who you are to the federal government, happens on a visually and structurally disconnected site. That handoff is where trust is most fragile and where the design should be doing the most reassuring, not the least.
The IRS is losing the informational layer to commercial competitors. For many of the exact keywords that send the most traffic to IRS.gov, sites like Intuit, NerdWallet, and H&R Block also rank in the top ten organic results, meaning people are routinely getting their explanation of tax rules from a company trying to sell them software, not from the source. That is a content and clarity gap, not a marketing problem.
The rebuild
1. Reorganize the entire site around six or seven core tasks, not departments. File a return, check a refund, make a payment, respond to a notice, get a transcript, start a business, get help. Every page should be reachable from one of these paths within two clicks, with the department-based content library available underneath for people who want it.
2. Bring identity verification inside the IRS’s own visual and interaction language. The underlying id.me infrastructure can stay, but the presentation should feel continuous with IRS.gov, not like a jump to a third party. Continuity here is a trust feature, not a cosmetic one.
3. Extend the 2024 plain-language rewrite project to the entire site, not just twenty pages. The team already proved the model works. The rebuild is scope, not invention: apply the same interlinked, plain-language pattern IRS.gov already validated to the full content library, prioritized by the highest-traffic pages first.
4. Build a secure, structured AI assistant for common questions, not an open-ended chatbot. Given the stakes of a wrong answer from the federal government, this is a case for narrow, sourced, auditable generative AI answering specific documented questions, each response traceable to the actual code or publication behind it, not a freeform conversational layer. This is the same principle from the WebMD piece: generative AI belongs in the answer layer, with full traceability, not replacing the structured page.
5. Treat the notice-response flow as its own product. Responding to an IRS notice is one of the most stressful tasks on the site and currently one of the least designed for. A guided, step-by-step flow specific to notice type would do more for trust than almost anything else on this list.
The single recommendation
If I had to pick one place to start, it is the task-first reorganization. Everything else on this list matters, but a site organized by department will keep sending people down the wrong path no matter how good the identity flow or the AI assistant becomes underneath it. Fix the front door first, then the rest of the rebuild has somewhere to lead people.
A site nobody chooses to visit still deserves to be well designed. If anything, the obligation is higher here than almost anywhere else on this list, because the person on the other end did not opt in.
Sources: Similarweb irs.gov Traffic Analytics, June 2026. Semrush irs.gov traffic overview, December 2025 data. Service to the Citizen Awards, “IRS.gov Content Strategy” case study. Ahrefs irs.gov keyword and competitor data, June 2025.