Why is your LinkedIn reach down? Because it is down for nearly everyone. AuthoredUp analyzed more than 3 million LinkedIn posts and found median impressions fell 47% year over year: 1,211 per post in June 2024 down to 636 in May 2025. Ninety-eight percent of tracked users saw declines. You are almost certainly not being punished. The whole market repriced. That changes the question from "how do I fix my account" to "how do I win in the new market," and those have very different answers.
Reach fell platform-wide (median down 47%, 98% of users affected, per AuthoredUp's 3M-post analysis). A flood of likely-AI content diluted attention, and generic AI posts underperform badly (Originality.AI). Run four honest checks before blaming the algorithm. Then shift effort to comments and substance: my own data shows ~30K impressions a week from ~5 comments a day.
The data, dated and sourced
As of mid-2025, per AuthoredUp's analysis of 3M+ posts:
| Metric | June 2024 | May 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median impressions per post | 1,211 | 636 | -47% |
| Tracked users with declining reach | 98% of users | near-universal | |
Source: AuthoredUp analysis of 3M+ LinkedIn posts, June 2024 to May 2025.
Read that second row again. When 98% of people share a symptom, the cause is not something you did. A shadow ban that hits everyone is not a ban. It is a recalibration.
What actually changed
Two forces, stacking.
First, the supply side exploded. Originality.AI's 2025 study of 3,368 posts from 99 influential LinkedIn profiles classified 53.7% of long posts as likely-AI. More than half. When content supply doubles and attention does not, every post's share of the feed shrinks. Your 47% drop is partly just dilution math.
Second, the feed started punishing the flood. The same Originality.AI study found likely-AI posts underperform human-written ones in most professional sectors, by up to roughly 80% in strategy and innovation topics. (The one exception: AI won in Leadership & Inspiration, which tells you something about that genre.) The practical shift: engagement quality now beats volume. A post that starts eight real conversations outperforms a post that collects eighty drive-by likes.
Four honest checks before you blame the algorithm
I use this diagnostic on my own account and with customers. Run it in order. Most people never get past check one.
- Are impressions down but engagement rate stable? If your rate held while raw reach fell, you are experiencing the market, not a penalty. A ban craters both. My launch post reached fewer than 200 people in its first hour, but roughly 1 in 8 of them engaged. Low reach, high rate: healthy account, tight distribution. That is the 2026 normal.
- Did your posting consistency change? Be honest. Pull up your last 8 weeks. If you went from three posts a week to three posts a month, the algorithm did not abandon you. You abandoned the cadence, and reach decays with it.
- Is your content in the punished bucket? If your posts read like the 53.7% (generic openers, no specifics, no numbers, no stories only you could tell), the feed is treating you like the flood. That is not a shadow ban. That is grading.
- Are you comparing to your own viral outlier? If your baseline is your best post ever, everything looks like decline. Compare medians to medians. One post that popped is a lottery ticket, not a benchmark.
If all four checks come back clean and reach still cratered to near zero on every post for weeks, then investigate account restrictions. That case is rare. One place it is not rare: LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits extensions and bots acting on your account, and enforcement is real. Automation tools got restricted in April 2025 per public reports, and Kleo, with 70K users, shut down mid-2025. If you run engagement bots, your problem is not the algorithm.
The boost button showed up like a rainbow after rain
Back to my launch day. I had worked on that post for days. I hit publish, watched it stall under 200 impressions in the first hour despite the 1-in-8 engagement, and then, like a miracle, LinkedIn floated the boost button on top of my post. Pay to fix the reach we just limited.
I took a breath and did not press it.
Here is my opinion, and I want to be clear it is opinion: if LinkedIn ever throttles organic reach primarily to push creators toward paid boosts, it will ruin the platform. The moment creators believe reach is being held hostage, they stop investing, and the content that makes the feed worth opening dries up. I do not think that is what the 47% drop is. The dilution and quality data explain it well enough. But the boost button appearing at your lowest moment is a dark pattern, and you should treat it like one. Do not pay to paper over a distribution problem you can fix with behavior.
What to actually do
Three moves, in order of return.
Comment more than you post. Commenting is the most underpriced activity on LinkedIn right now. My own numbers: roughly 5 thoughtful comments a day earn me about 30K impressions a week. Prospects have recognized me from my comments before intro calls. One customer's LinkedIn SSI rose from 45 to 57 in two weeks of consistent commenting. Comments ride other people's distribution, so they are far less exposed to the reach recalibration than posts are.
Hold a cadence you can sustain. Two real posts a week, every week, beats a burst of five followed by silence. Consistency is the one input the recalibration did not touch.
Ship substance, not volume. Specific numbers, real stories, positions you can defend. The Originality.AI data says the feed already discriminates against generic content. Make that work for you: in a feed that is 53.7% likely-AI, sounding like a specific human is a distribution strategy.
If you want the system, not just the diagnosis
Everything above is doable by hand: audit your rate, comment daily, draft from your own stories. That is exactly how I run my account, and the tooling I built for it became Liftli. It works inside the AI you already use (Claude today, ChatGPT and Cursor next), drafts posts and comments from your voice notes and calls in your extracted voice, and nothing ships without your one-tap approval. Publish & schedule through official APIs, gated by your one-tap approval. Free tier, no card, paid from $29.