Google’s AI Mode and AI Overview models are increasingly citing social media, especially YouTube and Reddit. But for prompts related to professional services (data science, supply chain logistics, sales, real estate, legal, etc.), LinkedIn can punch above its weight.
For 70 topics that we analyzed, LinkedIn accounted for 0.4% of Google AI Mode’s citations on average, but for the topic “auditing services,” LinkedIn’s citation share totaled almost 7%. The same topic also had a 5x higher LinkedIn citation share than average on Google AI Overview.
For products and services aimed at professionals, then, LinkedIn is an important channel for marketers to optimize.
What parts of LinkedIn get cited?
Bots have several paths through which they can crawl on LinkedIn. They can see posts (linkedin.com/posts/), articles (linkedin.com/pulse/), profiles (linkedin.com/in/), company pages (linkedin.com/company/), top content (linkedin.com/top-content/) and more.
LinkedIn’s “Top Content” is further pathed by topic - linkedin.com/top-content/marketing, linkedin.com/top-content/artificial-intelligence, etc. This provides easy indexing for AI models to retrieve relevant posts.
Models cite these paths to different degrees. ChatGPT prefers posts over articles. Google prefers articles over posts. Company pages matter for ChatGPT. They're basically irrelevant for Google.
For posts, bots can see the author, the author’s LinkedIn page (including follower count and the profile’s headline), publish time, reactions (including comments and reposts), attached file text and video captions when rendered on the page. For articles, bots can see the same, as well as multiple independently retrievable passages and structured elements like headings and lists.
How to write to get cited
Brooke Weller, LinkedIn’s AI search strategist, offered specific guidance on how to get your posts and articles cited by AI during a presentation at brightonSEO in San Diego on September 16.
Posts should be 200-300 words and offer timely insights, conversation starters or amplification. Articles should be 800-1,200 words and offer thought leadership, frameworks or deep analysis. Articles should also be highly structured with headings, lists, bullets and data.
Weller also advised editing profile’s custom URLs to include a topic you want to be cited for (Weller’s is linkedin.com/in/brooke-weller-aeo-optimizations) and treating the first sentence of a LinkedIn post like a headline, including the words you would want to be included in a citation.
Content from individuals tend to be more cited than content from company pages, according to Weller, especially if the individual has at least 3,000 followers and posts at least three times a week.
Methodology
At Evertune, we track thousands of brands across LLMs by running millions of prompts a day. For this analysis, we reviewed more than 6.3 million LinkedIn citations from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overview in July, August and September. The citations were in responses to prompts about 70 topics. Each prompt had 55 unique prompts, which were repeated multiple times a day per model.
Evertune is the first Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform built to explore, measure, act and advertise across the entire AI customer journey, connecting brands directly to ChatGPT Ads and programmatic advertising partners like The Trade Desk and Index Exchange. Where most GEO tools sample each prompt once a day, Evertune samples every prompt 100 times per model across 11+ AI models, delivering statistically significant visibility data at half the cost of competing platforms. Evertune's agents do the work for you: a prompt agent mines over 150 million real user conversations to find the exact questions buyers ask, an insights agent tells you what to do next each week, and an ads agent builds a complete ChatGPT campaign around your visibility gaps. From there, Evertune closes the loop with website optimization, data-driven content creation, source-level influence mapping and paid activation through affiliate and programmatic AI retargeting partners. Founded by the team that pioneered programmatic advertising at The Trade Desk, now building the next marketing channel.
