Under the same LinkedIn post, two people will now see a different comment at the top. The platform has started ranking comments by how relevant they are to a particular reader. The decision depends on the person’s professional interests, connections and past activity. The change was flagged by creator economy expert Lindsey Gamble, Vice President of Creator Strategy & Innovation at IZEA.
For brands and creators, this changes the reach arithmetic in a place where almost nobody used to think about it. A comment under someone else’s post was mainly a way to appear under the right name at the right time. Now the comment section becomes another sorted surface, where the visibility of a reply follows the same logic as the feed itself.
Comment order stops being uniform
LinkedIn now shows comments according to their relevance for each individual user. The system takes into account the person’s professional interests, their network of contacts and what they have interacted with before. The aim is to push more substantive and timely discussions higher and keep people longer on professional content.
The practical consequence is that comment order is no longer uniform. The reply that one reader sees at the top may sit lower for another. Someone commenting for reach stops competing for a single spot under a post and starts competing for relevance to the audience they want to reach.
Time spent in comments is growing
Comments have become measurably more important to the platform. In its quarterly report LinkedIn said that time spent on comments under posts rose 18% year on year, and total content consumption rose 10%. Discussions under posts have thus become one of the few places on the professional network where both time and attention are growing.
Ranking comments is a way to put that attention to use. If the platform can estimate which reply will interest a particular person, it keeps them at the screen longer and increases the chance they join in themselves. The comment section is moving from an add-on to a post into a standalone distribution channel.
AI text in comments is increasing
The change comes at a time when LinkedIn is fighting AI-generated content, including in comments. According to an analysis by the startup Pangram Labs, more than 40% of long LinkedIn posts were fully created by AI. The study covered more than a million posts across five platforms: besides LinkedIn also Medium, Substack, X and Reddit, in a window of roughly two and a half months, from the end of April to the start of July. According to Pangram, comments were not much better than the posts themselves once length was taken into account.
At the same time, LinkedIn is cracking down on coordinated groups that exchange reactions with each other, so-called engagement pods, and on automated spam. The platform is also testing a feature that will let users report an AI-generated comment. Ranking by relevance and action against inauthentic replies aim at the same goal: keeping comments readable when there are more of them and some are written by machines.
Personalisation changes how comments are targeted
For European marketing teams, LinkedIn is the main professional channel, and organic reach through comments under other people’s posts is one of the cheap ways to get in front of decision-making audiences. Personalised ranking neither makes this tactic cheaper nor more expensive across the board, but it does change its targeting. A comment with no link to a reader’s interests and network sinks, regardless of how quickly it was written or how many reactions it collected.
LinkedIn presents the growth in time spent on comments as evidence of healthier discussion, but the parallel data on the share of AI text offers a second reading too. Whether the growth is driven by people or partly by bots will decide whether personalised ranking is a tool for better discussion or a more efficient sorting of content that people increasingly do not write.
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