AI reads LinkedIn. Make sure it finds you.

Last Thursday I recorded an interview with Larissa Banting for her Visibility on a Dime summit. My topic was how to generate leads with LinkedIn newsletters.

Larissa runs a podcast booking agency, so visibility is her whole business. When I explained what happens when you launch a newsletter on LinkedIn, she said, "I had no idea about any of that, Adrian. I just feel like my mind has just exploded."

Then she told me about a standalone LinkedIn article she'd written that ended up on page one of Google. For about 2 years, inbound leads came from that one article. She'd never thought about doing a newsletter, because when she'd looked at the feature, her reaction was, "Oh gosh, that seems like a lot of work."

I hear that a lot. Newsletters are one of the most overlooked features on LinkedIn. Most people post every week, sometimes every day, and they just don't touch the newsletter feature.

And now there's another reason to use it, because AI is reading LinkedIn too.

What happens when someone checks you out

Before someone books a call with you, they check you out. They look at your LinkedIn profile and your website. And more and more, they ask ChatGPT, Claude or another AI assistant about you, or about the problem you solve.

So where does the AI get its answer from?

Earlier this year, Meltwater looked at about 9.5 million citations across 6 AI models. LinkedIn was the second most-cited site. Content from individual people was cited far more than company updates. And LinkedIn articles and plain text posts made up 83% of all the citations.

LinkedIn shared that research on its own marketing blog, so I’ll let you decide if it’s neutral. (And it didn't say how the research was done.) But it fits with something I've seen for years with Google.

LinkedIn articles get found

A LinkedIn article, even one that isn't part of a newsletter, is highly searchable on Google, because LinkedIn ranks very highly on Google.

If you only publish on your own website, your website has to compete with everything else out there, and the chances of it getting on page one of a Google search are very low. On LinkedIn, the chances are actually very high. That's what happened with Larissa's article. And a while back, when I was putting out a lot of articles, someone who booked a call with me told me they'd first found me through one of my LinkedIn articles on Google.

Nobody has told me yet that they found me through ChatGPT or Claude. But if that research is right, AI is citing the same kind of LinkedIn articles that Google finds. According to the report, AI models prefer content written by credible people who share their expertise with examples and data.

Why a newsletter is better than an article

A newsletter is basically an article on steroids. You get everything Larissa got from her article, plus a captive audience.

When you launch your first newsletter, LinkedIn invites all of your followers and connections to subscribe. In my experience, between 10% and 25% of them opt in, as long as it's a subject your audience wants to hear about. That's why I'd get to at least about 1,000 followers or connections before you launch.

After that, every time you publish an edition, your subscribers get a notification on LinkedIn and an email from LinkedIn (as long as their emails are switched on, which most people's are). With a normal post, you're at the mercy of the algorithm. A newsletter edition goes to your subscribers. It's one of the few things on LinkedIn that gets you in front of people without relying on the algorithm.

And it keeps growing. Every new person who follows you gets an invitation to subscribe, and so does everyone who accepts your connection request.

You can also see exactly who subscribes. A subscription is a clear buying signal. It doesn't mean they're going to become a client, but it's people putting their hand up and saying, "I'm interested in what you do, and I want to know more." So you can reach out and start a conversation with something like, "Hey, I saw you opted into my newsletter. I'm just curious, what had you do that?"

If you add your newsletter to the Featured section of your profile, it puts a subscribe button right there. Anyone checking out your profile can subscribe with one click, with no form to fill in and no email address to give.

The catch

The only drawback is that LinkedIn owns your audience, and it doesn't give you your subscribers' email addresses.

So build your email list as well. Put your lead magnets and freebies in your newsletter, and use it to get people onto your list.

I repurpose every article everywhere. It goes on my website, on Kit as an email, and on LinkedIn as a newsletter edition, and I build my LinkedIn posts from it. So it's a whole system, and the whole thing takes under an hour.

It doesn't need to be long either. One decent-sized article a week is plenty. Not War and Peace, but more than a post. If you find you're writing very long posts, they're probably better off as newsletter articles anyway. And I'm not saying use AI to write it, but you can use AI to help you.

Larissa runs a visibility business, and she had no idea about any of this. As I said to her, people just don't use it, and it amazes me.

Bottom line: pick your best piece of long-form content and make it as good as you can get it, because the first one really matters. Give it a nice cover image, make the title very clear and very specific to your audience, and publish it as your first LinkedIn newsletter. Then see if you can get 15 or 20% of your audience to subscribe right out of the gate. Why not?

I built a tool you can use to create your own newsletters in less than 30 minutes each week (it’s how I created this one). It will give you ideas and write using your words. It’s part of Larissa’s Visibility on a Dime Summit.