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LinkedIn isn’t cracking down on AI. It’s cracking down on generic content.

  • Hannah Kitchener
  • Associate Director
  • July 27, 2026
AI-generated image using Google Gemini
As LinkedIn takes action against low-value content, the lesson for industrial marketers is not necessarily to avoid AI tools but to rethink what makes content worth reading. When polished posts become easier to create, original expertise, practical experience, and genuine perspective become the things that set brands apart.

Key takeaways

• LinkedIn is not penalising users for using AI. It is reducing the reach of content that is generic, repetitive, or lacks a meaningful point of view.

• A post can be written entirely by a person and still fail to engage if it could have been published by any company in the industry.

• Industrial businesses have a natural advantage: the specialist knowledge and real-world experience that AI cannot generate from a prompt.

• In an increasingly crowded digital landscape, the question for communications teams is not “How do we create more content?” but “What can we say that nobody else can?”

Content creation on LinkedIn is up 14% year on year, fuelled in part by AI tools that make it easy for anyone to publish polished posts at scale. Among that AI-assisted content are some genuinely useful insights, but it has become much harder to find those golden nuggets of wisdom among the ‘AI slop’, which the platform describes as ‘low-effort, AI-generated content that may sound polished on the surface but lacks any real unique perspective or substance’.

Why LinkedIn in targeting low-value content, not AI-assisted writing

LinkedIn is tackling the issue through new technology developed with its editorial team to identify generic or repetitive content and limit its reach across networks, so users see less of it. The important thing to note here is that LinkedIn is not penalising users for using AI. It recognises that AI tools have helped a much wider range of professionals to share their perspectives with confidence by translating their thoughts into well-structured and grammatically correct text. What it is really trying to limit is content that adds little value and this affects everyone posting on LinkedIn, whether they are using AI to polish their posts or not.

AI has amplified a problem that existed long before it arrived

It’s also important to remember that generic content was a problem long before AI became freely available to the public. LinkedIn has always been filled with broad observations and familiar leadership lessons that are difficult to disagree with but equally difficult to remember. AI just exacerbated the situation. No matter how the text is finalised, the goal is to contribute a post that gives readers a reason to stop scrolling – problems your competitors haven’t solved or lessons learned that don’t appear in textbooks.

The test for every communications team: could anyone else have written this?

This applies to more than social media. As polished content becomes abundant everywhere on the web, organisations are increasingly judged on the originality of what they contribute, not simply how well they say it, in the trade media and on their website too. LinkedIn’s announcement, therefore, prompts a useful question for every communications team regardless of the channel: Does this content contain something only we could have written?

Why industrial expertise is the advantage AI cannot replicate

This should play to the strengths of industrial businesses that are full of people with specialist knowledge and practical lessons that can only be generated from years of solving technical problems – not from an AI prompt. The challenge is ensuring those insights survive the journey from subject matter expert to published content.
If your communications team is thinking about how to turn specialist knowledge into content that stands out because of what it says – not just how well it says it – we’d be delighted to share what we’re seeing across industrial B2B. Get in touch with the SE10 team to start the conversation.

Hannah Kitchener

Associate Director

About the author

Hannah is an associate director in the UK, leading strategic campaigns for industrial clients across the EMEA region. A professionally qualified journalist (NCTJ), she combines specialist sectoral knowledge in construction, energy, and materials handling with a strong network of trade media contacts to secure valuable coverage. Her expertise in inter-cultural communication, honed by degrees in modern languages and translation, is key to executing campaigns that succeed across diverse European markets.

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