Is it worth paying attention to what dictators say in public speeches? Contrary to a typically assumed ‘non-informative’ perspective, we propose that authoritarian communication can be ‘informative’ in the sense that autocrats change spending based on what they emphasize in their rhetoric. Leaders stay on message by diverting spending to areas they pay attention to in speech for purposes of cooptation and building a reputation for competence. Drawing on a corpus of presidential addresses of all post-Soviet autocrats 1991–2023, supplemented with analyses of Russian regions and a global sample of autocratic speakers in the UN, and semi-supervised keyword-assisted topic analysis, we find that autocratic issue attention to social and security matters is indeed followed by higher social and military spending. Our results show that authoritarian communication is more informative than hitherto thought, and also demonstrate that cooptation and legitimation strategies, which were previously studied independently, are indeed highly intertwined.