If you’ve spent more than 5 minutes on LinkedIn, you’ve doubtlessly seen one or more “gurus” making claims that they’ve “hacked the LinkedIn algorithm” and if you only comment on their time-limited post, they’ll sell you the secret to boosting your performance on LinkedIn.

That isn’t how LinkedIn works. In fact, there is no LinkedIn “algorithm” – not one, anyway. Instead, there’s a series of sophisticated AI models at work under the hood.

In this newly updated, totally unofficial guide to LinkedIn’s algorithm, we’ve boiled down dozens of LinkedIn engineering articles and papers to distill out how LinkedIn works, how it evaluates your content step by step, and what you should do to improve your chances of being seen.

After the walkthrough, there are THREE step-by-step LinkedIn checklists that you can use or delegate to your social media creators to ensure they’re following practices that LinkedIn’s systems will appreciate – a checklist for your LinkedIn Profile, a checklist for your content, and a standard operating procedure for your day-to-day activities. Use these checklists to help boost your LinkedIn results based on how LinkedIn actually works.

Plus, all new for this edition, there’s a NotebookLM instance included with the guide that you can ask followup questions to.

This guide was last updated based on new information from LinkedIn on September 24, 2025. If you have the previous version, toss it out!

Download your copy now for free!