If your LinkedIn reach collapsed this year, there is finally a number that explains it, and it has nothing to do with your hooks.

Richard van der Blom's Algorithm InSights research tracks the shift over time: since 2022, the visibility of posts from "Top Creators" climbed from 15% to 31%, while visibility of posts from "Other Creators" — everyone else — fell from 57% to 28%.

Read that again slowly. Nearly a third of what a LinkedIn user sees now comes from a narrow band of high-performing accounts. The bucket that contains almost every coach, consultant and trainer on the platform lost half its share of the feed in four years.

The feed is consolidating around a smaller cohort of high-performing creators.

What actually changed

Not the content. The logic.

LinkedIn shifted from a system based on social networks — who you know — to one based on interests — what interests you. Van der Blom's analysis of 1.8 million posts found organic reach fell by almost 50% as that shift took hold.

The practical effect is that your connection list stopped being a distribution asset. Since the rollout of 360Brew, LinkedIn's AI ranking layer, 60% of a post's initial reach goes to interest-based clusters — people who care about the topic — rather than to your direct connections.

Which is why follower counts have become an unreliable status symbol. Follower count and reach are structurally decoupled in the 2026 data: an account with 8,000 focused followers can outperform one with 80,000 unfocused ones, because the interest graph rewards relevance rather than volume.

Being big is now actively expensive. For accounts above 50,000 followers, van der Blom's numbers show reach down 62%, engagement down 67% and follower growth down 83%. The 15,000–25,000 follower tier is the current sweet spot.

The researcher isn't exempt from his own findings. Van der Blom, who has 250,000+ followers, reported his own average views dropped from roughly 30,000 to 10,000–11,000 per post under the new system.

The 2026 number is worse

This year's report widened the lens. Van der Blom and his team analyzed over 1.3 million posts from 50,000 creators for the 2026 LinkedIn Algorithm Insights report. Reach is down 60% for active creators over the last two years.

And then the part that should genuinely unsettle anyone buying engagement advice.

"I normally get around 20 to 30 comments in the first five minutes and 80% of them are AI written," van der Blom said on the Creator Science podcast. "80% and obviously a lot of time from the same people."

Comments are the signal coaches have been told to chase for three years. Comments carry roughly 2x more weight than likes. If four out of five of the earliest ones on a heavily-followed post are machine-written, the most valuable currency on the platform is being counterfeited during exactly the window that decides distribution.

LinkedIn has noticed. In March 2026, its Authenticity Update killed engagement bait, automation pods and external link spam, and reduced polls to a negligible 0.07% engagement rate. Van der Blom's data also found 44% of LinkedIn content now shows AI signals, and fully AI-generated posts get 2.8x less reach and nearly 5x less engagement.

What the winners are doing instead

One variable keeps surfacing in the research: focus. The term used is Topic Authority — LinkedIn's internal measure of how credible and consistent you are on a given subject. It drives distribution. Sticking to two or three core topics for 90 days correlates with +27% reach and +41% topic-based follows.

That is a brutal instruction for the average coaching account, which posts mindset on Monday, pricing on Wednesday, a personal-journey carousel on Friday and a book recommendation on Sunday. If the system cannot categorise you into clear topic clusters, your content travels poorly.

Format still moves the needle. Document posts — PDF carousels — are hitting 6.60% engagement rates, the highest of any format, while standard text posts struggle to break 2%.

But the most telling adjustment is where van der Blom now sends his own business. He says 80% of his LinkedIn-driven business — the consulting, the memberships, the report sales — comes from his weekly newsletter, not his daily posts.

The man with the most complete map of the feed is routing around it.

Worth noting: he has paid for the map. He's been targeted by LinkedIn's legal team, banned from the platform, and watched the third-party tools he relied on get shut down one by one. He keeps publishing anyway.