This is why your LinkedIn impressions dropped
You’ve probably been asking yourself this very question all year. Because you certainly aren’t making it up and you’re certainly not alone. But the answer is not as straightforward as you might think.
LinkedIn has rolled out six major updates this year alone. It has shifted from rewarding activity to rewarding relevance. It is actively reducing the visibility of generic content, automated and ego-baited engagement, while becoming far more sophisticated at identifying actual expertise, meaningful engagement and content that can hold attention.
In this article, we break down what’s changed, why LinkedIn made these changes, the impact and what it means now.
it started with, LinkedIn going after automated engagement tactics with a view to ending ‘engagement pods’
These are groups of LinkedIn members who coordinate to artificially boost each other’s posts with early likes, comments, and shares to trick the platform’s algorithm into giving them more visibility.
For years, automated commenting tools and pods artificially inflated engagement signals. A post could receive dozens of comments within minutes, fooling the algorithm into believing there was genuine interest.
But it added little value to the conversation. There was no inherent value in this engagement. LinkedIn wanted engagement to reflect actual value rather than coordinated activity.
Posts that relied heavily on coordinated boosting and engagement metrics suddenly found their content losing momentum. Coordinated engagement pods are now effectively meaningless. It does nothing other than signal to the algorithm that you’re trying to inflate your engagment.
Effortless comments hold little-to-no value and a like is a hollow metric.
Thoughtful engagement – a challenge, a question or a genuine observation – now carries far more weight than generic responses posted at scale.
In March, the platform fundamentally rebuilt its ranking system.
Before this, your posts were scored largely in isolation and content shared with your followers. Now, LinkedIn’s algorithm analyses interactions from a member’s content history and feeds you content based on what you’ve been engaging.
It looks at dwell time on posts, long reads and most importantly, skips to decide what it shows and what it doesn’t.
It could be said that LinkedIn now works more like Instagram and Facebook. The more you engage with a particular topic, the more of that you’re going to see.
The platform wants to understand and reward genuine interest.
A like takes seconds. It’s effortless but also meaningless. LinkedIn wants to show you things that it thinks you’re going to truly engage with. This is inherent to the entire value chain of the channel.
Content that previously generated broad distribution no longer travels as far as it did. All the while, more detailed, nuanced and insightful content is performing better, despite attracting fewer likes. Attention is becoming a stronger ranking signal than outright engagement. To the point where, if readers don’t linger, the algorithm notices.
Historically, content primarily competed against similar content within its own niche.
A B2B marketing post previously competed against other marketing posts. A sales leadership post competed against other sales leadership posts. A customer success post competed against other customer success posts.
Under LinkedIn’s new ranking model, that’s no longer the case.
Now, a marketing post may compete with leadership content. That leadership content may compete with workplace culture discussions, and workplace culture content may compete with AI, productivity or industry-specific insights.
LinkedIn now maps the full range of topics each user engages with and ranks content based on their evolving interests rather than rigid content categories.
We don’t consume information in neat boxes. A buyer interested in data security will also care about risk, governance, cloud architecture and regulation. So they rebuilt the algorithm to reflect this
The traditional advice to “pick a niche and dominate it” still works, but with some caveats.
Creators and thought leaders are no longer solely competing with directly correlating specialists. Now they’re competing against everything else their audience finds valuable, relative to their experience.
This doesn’t mean subject matter expertise is less important. It makes broader relevance matter than ever. It means being useful to your audience’s wider professional world has become a competitive advantage.
LinkedIn VP and Executive Editor Laura Lorenzetti announced new detection systems. The purpose was to separate authentic perspectives from generic content.
This new system specifically targets automated comments produced at scale, AI-assisted content with little human input and replies that simply repeat the original post – we’ve all seen them!
According to Lorenzetti, early testing identified generic content correctly 94% of the time.
They wanted to ‘keep conversations real’
Gen-AI flooded our feeds with slop. Then it became saturated. All we saw was generic repetitive content. So, they put measures in place to re-prioritise expertise, experience and original thinking.
Many creators continued posting, but found distribution shrinking.
Content still appeared in the feeds, but it didn’t have the same mileage.
Using AI, ironically, isn’t the issue here. The real issue, which sits behind AI, is content that lacks any real personal insight. It’s less about the tool itself and more about how and where that tool is used.
In July, LinkedIn introduced a feature allowing users to flag content that appears to be low-quality AI-generated material. This was huge.
The ‘looks like AI Slop’ button gives users the ability to feed into ranking models. Distribution penalties are immediate, with private analytics notifications sent to affected creators. LinkedIn also revealed it was blocking hundreds of thousands of automated comments every day.
Notably, the company even removed its own AI-powered “Enhance Your Post” feature, with its Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan stating that “AI slop is a top priority for all of us.”
Platforms succeed when users trust the content they see.
Flood it with sub-par, generic content and creator trust isn’t the only thing to go down. Trust in the platform does too. It is a simple fact that LinkedIn became saturated with AI content. So, they took action to prevent this and preserve their value proposition.
The AI slop button has put a degree of power back into the hands of users.
LinkedIn users aren’t just consuming content – they’re helping train and curate an algorithm. So the authenticity, value and usefulness of content have become THE primary factor.
This one is subtle but effective. LinkedIn has changed how you see comments.
It used to show them in the order they were written. Now you see comments based on relevance. Two people could see the same post, but be presented with an entirely different mix of comments.
LinkedIn wants to surface conversations that are most likely to matter to each member. Because it wants you to get involved with things it thinks matter to you.
Personalised comments deliver a more personalised experience.
Comment visibility has become more fragmented. The same comment may appear prominently for one person, while remaining entirely invisible to another.
So participating in discussions where your buyers, prospects and industry peers are already active creates stronger relevance signals than commenting broadly across unrelated conversations.
You may also notice that your comments get way more reach than your posts. This means strategic commenting has become more important than ever.
LinkedIn has systematically reduced the effectiveness of gamified engagement tactics – like engagement pods and automated commenting.
It has come down hard on generic content and formulaic posting frameworks. At the same time, increasing the value of original thinking, personal expertise, time spent engaging with content and broader contextual engagement.
This has left us in a place where posts aren’t achieving the same levels of mass distribution. But those that do achieve this are doing so based on true value, not artificial signals
The creators and brands making the most out of LinkedIn are doing the following three things consistently.
They’re sharing unique experiences and perspectives that cannot be copied.
They’re creating content that holds attention rather than attracting reactions.
They’re participating in meaningful discussions with the audiences they want to reach.
Being active on LinkedIn isn’t about engagement and reach
It’s about relevance.
AMBITIOUS is an award-winning PR agency specialising in corporate and b2b communications, we aim high, just like our clients.
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