Two weeks ago, LinkedIn shipped a button that lets your readers flag your posts as "AI slop."

The takes have already run their course. Our #marketing-inspo channel went from "it's about damn time" to "this is wildly unfair" over the course of a day.

We think it signals something much bigger.

For the past year, LinkedIn has begun rewarding content that feels unmistakably human. (If you've been reading The Standard for a while, this is the thing we've been telling you to bet on all along. 👀)

Our Senior Copywriter and resident LinkedIn expert Sarah Harvard went back down the rabbit hole to write up 6 practical plays that can help you earn visibility under the new algorithm. 

Let’s get into it.

Last month, we covered the mechanics of LinkedIn’s new algorithm. The natural next question: Now what? 

Sarah spent a deranged amount of time reading through LinkedIn’s engineering updates and research reports, then tested what actually earns visibility across executive accounts.

Here’s what she found.

LinkedIn stopped counting engagement and started weighing it. Meaning, what matters right now is value.

Good.

Every signal above a “like” costs the reader something, and a “save” is the only one where they decide they'll need your post again later.

And when LinkedIn flags a post as low-value, it doesn't delete it or tell you. It quarantines the post to your first-degree connections, so the second and third degree (where buyers live) never see it. Ouch.

Here are 3 of the plays from Sarah’s playbook that have already changed how we’re writing for clients.

Play #2: Post the receipts, not the recap.

Originality does not require a research budget.

Companies already have original content. It’s hiding in the Slack thread where a decision got made, the email that changed a client’s mind, the customer objection sales hears every week, the failed experiments you autopsied, and the templates your team relies on every day.

One example from the playbook compares two ways to tell the same story:

“I want to share something we’ve been working on…” versus “We cut revision cycles by 42%.”

The second earns the read because it leads with evidence. 

“A screenshot of a real process beats 10 posts describing one,” writes Sarah.

Play #3: Delete your first sentence.

This one hurt a little.

The algorithm front-loads your opening sentences when deciding what your post is about and who should see it. Too often, those sentences are spent throat clearing.

Delete your first sentence. 

If the post still makes sense, it wasn’t doing any work.

Instead of explaining the play, run the play.

Play #6: Comment like it’s a post.

LinkedIn is now treating comments like original pieces of content.

Comments now generate their own impressions, putting your expertise in front of someone else's audience.

Sarah recommends treating every comment like a tiny piece of thought leadership:

• Respond to one specific point, not the post as a whole.

• Add something the original post didn’t include.

• Leave a question that keeps the conversation going. (And no, “Thoughts?” doesn’t count.)

It takes the same 15 seconds to write “Great breakdown!” as it does to add a useful observation of your own. 

And if the comment performs well, a post about it probably will, too.

The full playbook includes 3 more plays, and they all reinforce something we’ve believed for a long time.

Yes, AI makes it easier to publish. But now LinkedIn is making it more rewarding to have something worth publishing.

Get all 6 plays in the full playbook  →

Campaigns that got us talking: Granola could’ve launched its Apple Watch app with stickers or socks. Instead they worked with a London textile artist to create handwoven watch straps. It’s the kind of detail nobody needs to do and exactly the kind of detail people remember.

AI spotlight: Pelé's legendary 1959 soccer goal has survived only through eyewitness accounts and a few photos, until now. Google Gemini used AI to recreate the moment, giving a new generation a chance to see the goal they've only ever heard about. 

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: We spent a lot of time telling marketers to sound more human. But what if we took it one step further? Keep B2B weird. The cost of getting something wrong gets all the attention. The cost of being boring is usually much higher.

Aquarius (Head of Growth): Mercury’s in retrograde, which explains why your CAC is up and your will to live is down. This week, someone will ask you to “just A/B test it.” You will not dignify that with a response.

That's from the new Sunday edition of The Standard, Crowd Work, landing in inboxes starting Aug. 16.

Corporate horoscopes. Roasts of the week's worst campaigns. The conference conversations that should've stayed off the record. Confessions of a marketer.

Weekdays are for getting better at marketing. Sundays are for recovering from it.

If you're already subscribed to The Standard, it's coming for you either way. You're welcome.

ClickUp is paying up to $1M for a CMO with no team. Instead they’ll have roughly 3,000 AI agents handling everything from brand and positioning to creative, social, lifecycle, email, and content.

Eliminating an entire marketing department and replacing it with agents. What could go wrong?

We should remind you that none of this is about gaming the algorithm or squeezing out every last impression. It's about getting crystal clear on who you're writing to and why, then putting in the work to make something they'll actually want to read, save, and send to a coworker. 

By the way… we have a slight product suggestion for our friends at LinkedIn.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

The word algorithm comes from the Latinized name of 9th-century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Over time, "Algoritmi" became the word we now use for any step-by-step process. Think his friends called him Algo?