Your LinkedIn Posts Are Carrying A Lot More Weight Now

For years, we’ve been told to think about visibility in terms of search. Every marketer’s playbook is based around the same principles: Keyword optimization. SEO. Backlinks. Ranking on Google. If you’re not on page one, you may as well not exist.

But something has changed in the last few months, and the shift is quite eye-opening. For those of us on LinkedIn, it matters a lot. Visibility is no longer just where you rank, but instead if you show up in the answer. The reason for this is simple. More and more, people are doing their research within AI search models.

New research is showing that LinkedIn is now one of the most cited sources when AI tools answer professional queries. Even for non-business specific searches, LinkedIn is ranking in the top 20.

That includes individual posts, not just company pages.

Think about that for a second.

When someone asks a question about leadership, hiring, marketing, or any business topic, AI tools are increasingly pulling from the conversations happening on LinkedIn.

A recent report by Semrush showed that LinkedIn ranked second in citations in their data set, appearing in around 11% of all responses across three AI search platforms (ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode).

You might assume that only viral posts with massive engagement are surfaced. But that’s not the case at all. The majority of the posts being referenced have moderate engagement. (Not) sorry to everyone investing in engagement pods, but (ironically) having thousands of bot comments on your posts does not make it more likely for them to be surfaced in AI search.

They are being pulled for a different reason: They focus on sharing knowledge and advice in a way that is clear and specific.

One interesting stat is that about 75% of the LinkedIn authors cited post regularly, which was defined as five or more posts in four weeks.

We are at the early stages of what this means. A recent report by Gartner suggests that by 2027, 95% of the B2B buyer journey is going to begin in an LLM. Is this overly aggressive? Perhaps. But there is no denying that this shift is happening, and will only continue to grow.

SEO is based on ranking pages and where you land. AI visibility is about one thing only: being included in the response.

You can have a beautifully optimized website and still not appear in an AI-generated answer. At the same time, a well written LinkedIn post or article can be surfaced because it directly addresses the question being asked.

This creates an entire track of visibility that many people aren’t thinking about yet. But soon it will become impossible to ignore.

The call to action isn’t to post more content (unless you are not posting regularly). It’s a call to post content with more intention.

What gets surfaced tends to have a few things in common:

In other words, it’s useful, as opposed to being written for the algorithm. This is welcome news. You already have the insight. The opportunity is in how you articulate it.

Visibility has traditionally been about being found, and that is shifting toward being included. I have always believed that LinkedIn is the best place to share knowledge. Now it is becoming a place where that knowledge is being referenced

The people who understand this early on, and leverage it, will have a big advantage and a very different kind of visibility.

If this has you thinking about how your ideas are actually coming across, I’m opening up a small number of one hour sessions around this. I don’t typically offer these anymore, but this shift is creating a lot of questions, and it’s worth addressing directly.

If you want focused, practical guidance on your positioning and content, you can book here.

Until next month, Melissa