The LinkedIn company page is dead. Long live the expert

The data is difficult to ignore. LinkedIn has continued to prioritise content from personal profiles over company pages, dramatically reducing the organic reach of corporate accounts.

Research suggests company pages now account for only a small proportion of users' feeds, with organic posts typically reaching around 1.6% of followers. By comparison, content published by individuals consistently achieves higher visibility and engagement.  

The engagement gap makes it worse; Socialinsider's Q1 2026 data puts the LinkedIn engagement median at around 4.7 per cent for personal-profile content versus approximately one to two per cent for company pages.  

This isn't something brands can solve simply by posting more often or producing better creative. The platform has fundamentally changed how it distributes content. For marketing teams that have spent years building company page audiences, that's an uncomfortable reality. 

What the algorithm actually rewards 

LinkedIn's algorithm increasingly rewards meaningful interaction rather than volume alone.

Signals such as reading time, saves, shares, and substantive discussion in the comments now carry more weight than likes. A post that generates genuine conversation is more likely to be amplified than one that simply attracts hundreds of reactions.

Richard van der Blom's analysis of 1.8 million LinkedIn posts found that content attracting three or more comments within its first hour received more than five times the reach of posts that didn't.

Personal profiles naturally generate this kind of engagement because people interact with people. Company pages rarely do.

Format also matters. PDF carousel posts continue to achieve some of the platform's highest engagement rates (6.6 per cent), followed by native video (5.6 per cent). Meanwhile, posts containing external links are routinely shown to fewer users.

That last point is where many engineering, science, and technology companies are losing ground. Press coverage, case studies, white papers; every outbound link carries an automatic reach penalty. 

The practical response is to bring the value into the post itself: summarise the findings and share the most important information there and then on LinkedIn. Moving the link to a first comment used to help, though that workaround has also been penalised as of early 2026. 

Put people at the centre of your strategy 

The obvious response is to treat the company page as infrastructure and put the posting effort into individual profiles: founders, directors, engineers, subject matter experts, the work experience person; whoever you like. 

Because 85 per cent of purchase requirements are set before a buyer ever requests a meeting, people who are visible during that period are more likely to get the order.

AI is accelerating the shift 

LinkedIn’s changing algorithm is only part of the story. Increasingly, AI search tools are surfacing LinkedIn content in response to users’ questions. 

A SEMrush study analysing nearly 90,000 URLs cited by ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode and Perplexity found LinkedIn to be the second-most referenced.

That makes expert-led content valuable in two ways. It performs better within LinkedIn itself while simultaneously increasing the likelihood that both individuals and organisations are referenced in AI-generated responses. In other words, a strong personal profile is no longer just a social media asset. It has become part of a brand's wider digital visibility strategy.

Expertise is becoming your greatest marketing asset 

At Stone Junction, we’ve long prioritised what we have referred to as “hero profiles” over company pages, since LinkedIn became a primary social platform.  

For engineering, science and technology brands, this is genuinely an opportunity most competitors have not taken seriously yet. Engineering teams have knowledge that buyers are actively looking for. 

Sharing that knowledge through personal LinkedIn content, attributed to real people with real expertise, is now a distribution decision, a PR decision and improves AI visibility in one move. 

The companies that understand this shift now are likely to look very different from those that continue relying on company pages alone.

Richard Stone is the founder of technical PR agency Stone Junction, which is a corporate affiliate member of the CIPR.

Further reading

10 ways PRs should be using LinkedIn now the algorithm has changed

Sweet nostalgia is PR and marketing's not-so-secret weapon

Exploiting the algorithms: boost engagement with a live streaming strategy