4 September 2026 · 6 min read

Something has changed about how a senior person gets chosen, and it has very little to do with posting more.

Gartner asked 645 B2B buyers about a recent purchase. Two thirds of them, 67 percent, said they would rather buy without a sales person involved at all. Seventy percent said they would prefer the whole thing to be digital and self service. Forty five percent had used a generative AI tool during the purchase, mostly to research vendors. On average they used seven different sources.

Then the same research says something that looks like a contradiction. Sixty nine percent still take what the AI told them and check it with a human before they decide.

They do not want to talk to you while they are forming an opinion. They want to talk to you after.

Which means that by the time a conversation happens, most of the opinion is already built. It was built out of whatever was findable, in whatever shape a machine could compress.

Where you are being read now

OtterlyAI, a company that tracks AI search, looked at 1.3 million citations of LinkedIn content across six AI assistants between January and June of this year. It is a vendor study, not LinkedIn’s own data, so hold the numbers loosely. The direction is still worth knowing.

In their sample, LinkedIn is now the third most cited social source in AI answers, behind Reddit and YouTube. Its share of those citations moved from 7.8 percent in January to 11.7 percent in May.

Two details inside that study matter more than the headline.

Content published by a named person was cited far more than content from company pages. Named people accounted for 91.7 percent of the citations they counted.

And long form was cited roughly 2.8 times more often per piece than short posts.

Put those together and the picture is uncomfortable for anyone whose entire public presence is short posts under a company banner.

The reader you will never meet

I run LinkedElla, a private positioning and ghostwriting practice for senior executives and founders, most of them in the United States. Almost everyone who comes to me arrives with the same problem. The authority is real, the public record of it is not.

Which is where a second version of all this begins, and that one is older than AI.

The Edelman and LinkedIn research on B2B thought leadership, built on responses from close to 2,000 decision makers, keeps finding that the people who shape a purchase are often not the people in the meeting. They call them hidden buyers. More than 40 percent of deals stall on disagreement inside the buying group, in a room you are not in.

Someone has to be able to explain you accurately when you are not there to correct them.

So there are now two intermediaries between your work and the decision. A machine that summarizes you, and a colleague who repeats you. Neither of them has your context, your tone or your caveats.

What survives being compressed

This changes what is worth writing, and it is not a question of reach.

Some things survive a summary and some things evaporate.

• A claim survives. An atmosphere does not.
• A number survives. An adjective does not.
• A boundary survives. A benefit does not.
• A named situation survives. A general principle rarely does.

Most executive content is written to sound right when read in full. Very little of it is written to stay true when cut to three lines by something that does not know you.

This is not an argument for saying more. It is an argument for saying fewer things more precisely, which is a different discipline. I have written before about why not everything worth saying belongs on LinkedIn.

The repeatable sentence

Here is the exercise. It takes an hour and it is worth more than a month of posting.

1. Write the claim you want repeated

One sentence. No metaphor, no wordplay, nothing that needs the paragraph around it. If a colleague repeated only this sentence in a meeting, would it still be accurate.

2. Attach something concrete to it

A number, a named condition, a specific situation. Not because numbers impress, but because they survive. “We work with founders after the first institutional round” survives. “We help ambitious leaders grow” does not.

3. Say who it is not for

Exclusions compress better than promises. They are also harder to fake, which is exactly why a reader trusts them and a summary keeps them.

4. Put it somewhere long

One properly argued piece, with your reasoning and your evidence in it, does more for how you are represented than eight short posts. Short posts carry it to people. The long piece is what gets quoted back to them.

5. Keep the sentence the same everywhere

Headline, About section, article, post, the way you introduce yourself on a call. Not identical wording, the same claim. Every variation gives the summary another version to choose from, and it will not choose the one you like best. I wrote about the headline itself in Your LinkedIn headline has two readers now.

Two tests, three weeks apart

First test. Ask someone who knows your work, but does not work with you, to say what you do in one sentence. Do not help them. What comes back is your real position, not the one on your profile.

Second test. Ask an AI assistant what you work on and who you work with. Read the answer as information about your public record rather than as a verdict. If it is vague, your record is vague. If it is wrong, something findable is telling it that.

Neither test is flattering. Both are cheap, and both tell you more than a month of engagement numbers.

The part worth keeping

Buyers have not become less interested in people. Gartner found that 69 percent still want a human to confirm what they learned, and that buyers who feel confident about a decision are twice as likely to call the deal a good one.

The conversation still decides it. It just happens later, and you no longer control what happened before it.

So the work is not to be everywhere. It is to be accurately repeatable by people and machines that will describe you without asking you first.

Questions people ask about this

Does this mean I should write long articles instead of short posts?

No. It means you need at least one long piece that holds your reasoning, and short posts that carry it to people. The posts create attention. The long piece is what gets quoted when you are not in the room.

How do I find out what an AI assistant says about me?

Ask it directly. What does this person work on, who do they work with, what are they known for. Ask two or three different assistants, because they read different sources. Treat the answer as a report on your public record, not as a judgment of your work.

What if the answer is wrong or empty?

Empty usually means there is nothing findable in your own words, so the fix is to publish one clear piece under your own name. Wrong usually means something findable is saying it, often an old bio, a stale company page or a title you no longer hold. Correct the source before you write anything new.

Do I need to post more often for this to work?

Frequency is not the lever here. Consistency of subject is. Eight posts on one claim will do more for how you are described than forty posts on eight subjects.

Who is this advice for?

Senior people with real authority and no public record of it. Founders, executives and specialists whose work is known inside a small circle and invisible outside it. This is what LinkedElla does, quietly and under agreement.

1 September 2026 · 7 min read

A LinkedIn headline has always had an unfair job. It is one short line expected to carry a career, an area of expertise, a target audience, a little personality and enough proof to make a stranger stop scrolling.

For years, we mostly wrote it for people. We wanted it to sound credible, memorable and clear enough to earn a profile visit.

That is still true. But it is no longer the whole job.

I run LinkedElla, a private positioning and ghostwriting practice for founders and senior executives, most of them in the United States. Headlines are usually the first thing we fix, because they are the cheapest thing to get right.

LinkedIn is becoming better at understanding meaning. Its systems do not only look for exact keyword matches. They are learning to connect people, topics and content based on context.

Your headline is no longer only an introduction. It is also a signal.

The useful part of the algorithm conversation

There is a lot of dramatic advice around LinkedIn right now. Some of it makes the platform sound like a machine that reads five profile fields and ignores everything else.

That is too simple.

LinkedIn has publicly explained that its newer feed systems use language models to create richer representations of both members and content. For posts, the system can consider the author’s name, headline, company and industry, together with the post format, text, metadata and engagement signals. For members, it can use profile information, skills, work history, education and engagement history.

So no, the rest of your profile has not suddenly become useless.

But the headline still matters because it is one of the fastest pieces of context available. It sits beside your name in the feed, appears in search and gives both people and systems an early clue about your professional identity.

LinkedIn’s own engineering team uses a new member with only a headline and job title as an example of a cold-start situation. Even with limited history, the system can begin to infer likely professional interests and relevant content areas.

That does not make the headline magical. It makes clarity more valuable.

The first reader is human

A person does not study your headline. They glance at it.

They see your name, the opening of your post and one short line beneath it. In a fraction of a second, they are trying to answer a quiet question: has this person earned the right to speak about this?

This is why a clever headline can still fail.

A beautiful brand line may sound elegant. A long list of years may show experience. A senior title may create status. But if the visitor still cannot understand what the person does today, the headline has created admiration without recognition.

The reader should not need to open the profile and assemble the answer from the About section, current role and five previous jobs. The headline should reduce that work.

The second reader is the system

The system is asking a different set of questions.

• What professional category does this person belong to?
• What topics are connected to their work?
• Who might find their content useful?

Vague language makes those answers harder. “I help businesses grow” could describe a consultant, a CFO, a recruiter, an agency or a coach. It sounds positive, but gives very little context.

The opposite extreme is not better. A headline built from ten disconnected keywords may be easier to index, but it often sounds like a robot reading a service menu. People understand the words, yet still do not understand the person.

The goal is not to choose between a human headline and a searchable one.

The goal is to make the same sentence do both jobs.

Clarity is not keyword stuffing

This distinction matters because semantic systems are designed to understand related meaning, not only repeated words.

A person who writes about executive communication, leadership visibility, reputation, founder positioning and thought leadership is operating within one connected professional world. Those exact terms do not need to appear in every sentence. The system can increasingly understand those relationships. People can too.

Consistency does not mean repeating the same keywords for ninety days. There is no public LinkedIn rule that says ninety days will reset or repair a professional identity.

Consistency means that the important parts of the profile and the content stop contradicting one another.

The headline says one thing. The current role supports it. The About section adds depth. The content demonstrates the thinking behind it. The comments and conversations happen in the same professional neighborhood. Together, those signals create a clearer story.

A better way to build a headline

A strong headline usually contains five ingredients. They do not all need equal space, and they do not always need to appear as separate sections.

1. Start with the category

What do you want to be known for? Use language that people in your market already understand. Standard professional terms are often more useful than creative titles that require an explanation.

2. Name the audience

Who needs this expertise? Founders, senior executives, investors, healthcare leaders and small business owners are not the same audience. Specificity helps the right person recognize themselves.

3. Add the context

Where does the work happen, or what business problem does it solve? LinkedIn, executive communication, B2B sales and organizational change all provide useful context.

4. Add proof

Proof can be a senior role, years of relevant experience, a specific result or recognized expertise. It should strengthen the claim, not replace it.

5. Keep the signature

A strong brand line still has value. It creates memory and gives the headline character. But it usually works best after people understand the category and audience.

An illustrative example

Consider a generic headline such as:

Helping leaders build influence and make an impact.

It sounds warm, but the reader still does not know what kind of work is involved. A clearer version could be:

Executive Communication for Founders and Senior Leaders | LinkedIn Positioning and Ghostwriting | 15 Years in Corporate Communications

Do not judge it by one search

LinkedIn search results are personalized. The same query can produce a different order for different people based on their profile, activity, network, previous searches and other behavior. That means typing your own keyword into the search bar and looking for your name is not a reliable test.

A better check is to look at Search Appearances over time. Review the job titles and companies of the people finding you, profile views, relevant connection requests and the quality of inbound conversations.

Then ask whether the right people are recognizing you for the right work.

The five-second test

Before changing a headline, read it as if you know nothing about the person behind it.

• What do they do?
• Who do they help?
• In what professional context?
• Why should I trust them?
• What makes this positioning theirs?

If two or three answers are missing, the headline may sound impressive while still making the reader work too hard.

The point is recognition, not optimization

LinkedIn is changing, but people have not stopped being people. They still respond to a clear point of view, a true story, earned confidence and language that sounds like a real person. No algorithm update makes trust less important.

The machine should not become the voice of the profile. Its role is simply to make the right introduction more likely.

A good headline helps the system understand where the work belongs. A great one helps the right person recognize why it matters.

Two related pieces. Your buyer meets a summary of you first, on what survives when a machine or a colleague describes you. And Your job is not to become good at LinkedIn, on why clarity beats effort.

Questions people ask about this

How often should I change my headline?

Rarely. Change it when your work changes, not when you feel like experimenting. Every version you publish gives people and systems another description of you to choose from.

Does keyword stuffing help?

It makes you easier to index and harder to trust. A headline built from ten disconnected terms reads like a service menu, and the reader still cannot tell what you do.

Does the About section still matter?

Yes. The headline earns the click, the About section decides what happens after it. They should say the same thing in different depth, never two different things.

How do I test whether my headline works?

Do not search for your own name, results are personalised. Look at Search Appearances over time, at the job titles of people finding you, and at the quality of the conversations that start.

Who is this for?

Senior professionals who are recognised inside a small circle and invisible outside it. That is the work LinkedElla does.

31 August 2026 · 3 min read

A good story is not automatically a good public story. That distinction matters more when the person telling it already carries a reputation.

I have heard stories in conversations with clients that would make excellent posts. They are personal. Specific. Sometimes funny, sometimes difficult, often memorable.

And some of them should never be published.

Not because there is anything wrong with them. Because the question is not only whether a story is good. It is what happens when your name is attached to it.

I run LinkedElla, a private positioning and ghostwriting practice for founders and senior executives, most of them in the United States. A good part of the work is deciding what stays out.

A post does more than tell a story.

Every time someone with an established reputation publishes something, it adds information to the way they are understood. Sometimes that is useful. Sometimes it introduces a subject they never intended to become associated with.

A personal story can make someone more relatable and simultaneously move attention away from the expertise they are trying to establish.

A strong opinion can demonstrate conviction and create an argument that has nothing to do with the work they want to be known for.

A story from inside a company can be completely true and still belong to the company rather than to the individual telling it.

And something can be worth saying eventually, but wrong to say now. Context matters. Timing matters. So does what comes after.

I do not judge an idea by whether I can make it work as a post.

Most ideas can be made into posts. That is the easy part.

The more useful questions are different.

• Why are we saying this?
• What does it add to the way this person is understood?
• What might someone reasonably conclude from it?
• Does it reinforce the position we are building, complicate it in a useful way, or simply create noise?
• And is this something that should be public at all?

Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is not yet. Sometimes it is no.

That last answer matters.

Restraint is part of the work.

There is a strange incentive in content work to turn everything into content. A conversation becomes three posts. A meeting becomes a lesson. A difficult week becomes a vulnerability story. A private moment becomes an opportunity to appear more human.

I do not think an executive presence should work that way.

You do not owe the internet access to every interesting part of you. And your audience does not need to know everything about you in order to understand you well.

The objective is not maximum disclosure. It is an accurate public representation of who you are, what you know and what carries your name.

Sometimes publishing helps build that. Sometimes not publishing protects it. Knowing the difference is part of the job.

Two related pieces. A ghostwriter should occasionally tell you no, on saying no as part of the job. And Your LinkedIn headline has two readers now, on making the public part of you legible.

Questions people ask about this

How do I know if a story is too personal to publish?

Ask what someone could reasonably conclude about you from it, and whether that conclusion helps the position you are building. If the story is memorable but points away from your work, it is usually the wrong story.

Should executives avoid personal stories altogether?

No. A personal story that explains how someone thinks about their work is often the strongest thing they can publish. The test is whether it carries the professional point, not whether it is moving.

What about a story that belongs to the company?

Then the company usually should tell it. An individual telling a company story often creates confusion about who is speaking and on whose authority.

Who is this for?

People with an established reputation, where a single post changes how they are read by employees, clients and investors. That is who LinkedElla works with.

30 August 2026 · 3 min read

There is a version of LinkedIn advice that makes perfect sense for someone whose business is being visible on LinkedIn.

• Post frequently.
• Comment every day.
• Spend time engaging before you publish.
• Reply quickly.
• Study hooks.
• Follow formats.
• Build in public.
• Be consistent.

None of this is inherently bad advice. It is simply not advice I would give to every executive I work with.

I run LinkedElla, a private positioning and ghostwriting practice for founders and senior executives, most of them in the United States. Almost all of them have a full job already.

The people I work with already have a job.

They are running companies, making investment decisions, managing people, negotiating, travelling, building partnerships and dealing with things that will never become content.

LinkedIn should not become another operation they have to run. If maintaining an executive presence requires the executive to think about LinkedIn every day, something in the system is wrong.

The objective is not to make them better content creators. It is to make sure that when someone looks them up, what they find carries the weight of what they actually do.

Those are different objectives.

Visibility is useful only when it represents something accurately.

A person can become significantly more visible online without becoming better positioned.

More posts do not solve an unclear position. More engagement does not solve a profile that points to the wrong work. More personal stories do not automatically create trust.

And a large audience is not particularly useful if the people who matter still cannot tell what you know, what you are responsible for, or why your perspective carries weight.

That is why I would rather start with the person than with the content calendar.

• What are they actually building?
• What do they want to be understood for now?
• What from their previous work strengthens that position?
• Who needs to understand it?
• What should remain private?

Only then does publishing become useful.

The best system should require less from the principal over time.

At the beginning, I need more. I need conversations. Context. Corrections. Stories. Language. The things they notice and the things they dismiss. I need to understand why they make certain decisions before I can represent those decisions properly.

But the relationship should become easier, not heavier.

They should not have to brief every post from scratch. They should not have to teach me their voice every week. And they should not have to build their working day around a platform.

The longer I work with someone, the less explaining should be necessary. That is part of the value.

An executive presence should support the work someone is already doing. It should not become the work.

Two related pieces. A ghostwriter should occasionally tell you no, on judgment as part of the service. And Your buyer meets a summary of you first, on why one clear subject now travels further than volume.

Questions people ask about this

How much time should an executive actually spend on this?

After the first weeks, a couple of hours a month is realistic. The early period costs more, because that is when the voice, the context and the boundaries get established.

Does this mean posting rarely is fine?

Rarely is fine. Randomly is not. A small number of pieces on one subject does more for how you are understood than a busy feed on eight.

What do you need from the client at the beginning?

Conversations. The reasoning behind decisions, the language they actually use, the things they notice and the things they dismiss. That is what makes later work possible without a briefing every time.

Who is this for?

Senior people whose authority is real and whose public record is thin. That is the work LinkedElla does, quietly and under agreement.

29 August 2026 · 3 min read

If the only thing a ghostwriter does is turn instructions into good sentences, the relationship is incomplete.

There are times when a client will bring me an idea and I can see exactly how to write it. I can see the opening. I know where the argument goes. I know how to make it interesting.

And I still think we should not publish it.

That is not a writing decision. It is a judgment call.

I run LinkedElla, a private positioning and ghostwriting practice for founders and senior executives, most of them in the United States. Judgment is most of what they are actually paying for.

The brief is not always the right starting point.

Someone may want to respond publicly because something happened that morning. They may want to comment on an issue because everyone else in the industry is commenting on it. They may have a strong story that would perform well. They may want to explain a decision because they are tired of seeing it misunderstood.

All understandable.

But before I write, I want to know what publishing it does.

• Does this person need to be part of this conversation?
• Is LinkedIn the right place for it?
• Is this their subject to speak about?
• Does the timing create a meaning they did not intend?
• Could this be interpreted as a company position?
• Would silence actually be stronger?

The fact that something can be written well does not answer any of those questions.

Seniority changes the cost of a sentence.

The more responsibility someone carries, the less useful it becomes to judge content only by its potential engagement. Their words may be read by employees, clients, investors, journalists, partners, competitors or people considering working with them. The same sentence can mean different things to each of those groups.

That does not mean executives should become afraid to say anything. Quite the opposite. A strong public voice requires opinions.

But there is a difference between having a point of view and reacting to everything that gives you an opportunity to express one. Knowing when to speak is part of having a voice.

Sometimes my contribution is the post that never gets written.

There are occasions when the right answer is to change the angle. Sometimes it is to wait. Sometimes something belongs in a private conversation rather than a public one. Sometimes the company should speak instead of the individual. And sometimes the answer is simply no.

That can be uncomfortable in a service relationship. The client is paying you. They have asked for something. Producing it feels like the obvious definition of doing your job.

I see it differently. If my name is not going on the post but my judgment is part of the engagement, agreeing with every request would be the easier service and the worse one.

A ghostwriter should be able to write. But there will be moments when the more valuable skill is knowing when not to.

Two related pieces. Not everything worth saying belongs on LinkedIn, on which stories should stay private. And Your buyer meets a summary of you first, on the people who repeat you when you are not in the room.

Questions people ask about this

Does this mean an executive should publish less?

Not less for its own sake. It means every piece should have a reason that survives the week it was written in. Fewer posts with a clear purpose usually build a stronger position than a full calendar of reactions.

How do you decide when silence is stronger?

I ask what publishing adds to the way this person is already understood, and what a reader could reasonably conclude from it. If the answer is nothing, or something we did not intend, we wait or we drop it.

What happens if the client insists?

It is their name, so it is their call. My job is to make sure they are making it with the full picture, not to quietly agree because agreeing is easier.

Who is this for?

Founders and senior executives whose words carry consequences for employees, clients and investors. That is the work LinkedElla does, privately and under agreement.