A consultant, 18 years in his industry, brilliant at what he does, the kind of bloke who gets standing ovations at conferences, told me his LinkedIn reach had dropped 70% in six weeks. Same content. Same posting schedule. Same carefully optimised hooks he’d been using for two years.

He thought the algorithm was broken.

It wasn’t broken. It had grown up. And it had stopped rewarding the exact playbook that built his audience in the first place.

He’s not alone. And what’s happening to him is about to happen to a LOT of founders who’ve been coasting on borrowed tactics.

LinkedIn’s new system. they’re calling it 360Brew internally, is a single massive AI model that replaced thousands of smaller ones. And it’s doing something the old algorithm never did: checking whether what you post actually matches who you are.

Stay with me.

The old LinkedIn rewarded engagement velocity. Post something with a viral hook, get comments in the first hour, watch it spread. Didn’t matter if you were a fintech CEO posting motivational quotes about discipline or a marketing consultant sharing recycled Gary Vee takes. Volume and velocity. That was the game.

The new LinkedIn reads your profile, analyses your history, and asks a simple question: does this person actually know what they’re talking about?

If the answer is yes, if your content aligns with your stated expertise and your engagement history, you get rewarded. Not with viral reach. With qualified reach. Fewer eyeballs, better ones.

If the answer is no, if you’ve been gaming hooks, running engagement pods, or posting outside your lane for the dopamine hit, your reach falls off a cliff.

That consultant I mentioned? His content was good. But it was built on a formula. Hook templates. Engagement pod responses in the first ten minutes. The occasional “I got fired and here’s what I learned” story that had nothing to do with his actual expertise.

The formula worked. Until the platform decided formulas were the problem.

While LinkedIn quietly reshuffled the deck, YouTube went full scorched-earth.

They’ve demonetised billions of views. Removed thousands of channels. Not just the obvious AI slop, although that got torched too, but channels that were technically human-made and still got flagged as “interchangeable.”

That word matters.

𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲.

YouTube isn’t asking “is this content bad?” anymore. It’s asking, “Could someone else have made this?” And if the answer is yes, if your format, your structure, your narration style could be swapped with a hundred other channels and nobody would notice, you’re done.

The platforms aren’t cracking down on low quality. They’re cracking down on low distinctiveness. Which is a very different thing. You can produce beautifully edited, well-researched, perfectly structured content and still get punished. Because “well-made but generic” is now a category that the algorithms can detect. And they’ve decided it’s not worth promoting.

Google’s February 2026 Discover update shifted how content gets surfaced. The platform now directly answers questions inside the feed. Users don’t need to click through to your website. Your article, your blog post, your carefully SEO’d landing page, none of it matters if Google can extract the answer and serve it without sending a single visitor your way.

The click is dying.

What’s replacing it? Citations.

The new game isn’t “get people to your website.” It’s “be the source the AI references when it generates an answer.”

Which means the old content strategy: publish a blog, optimise for keywords, drive traffic, convert on-site, is collapsing in real time. And the new one requires something most founders don’t have: enough distinctive expertise that an AI model considers you a primary source worth citing.

Not an aggregator. Not a commentator. Not someone who summarises what others have already said. A primary source with original thinking.

If you’ve been recycling frameworks you learned from someone else’s course and repackaging them with different headers, the AI knows. And it will cite the original, not your version.

Here’s what’s interesting.

While the polished-expert crowd is watching their metrics collapse, a different kind of creator is thriving. The ones documenting their journey in real time. Sharing the messy middle. Posting about what they don’t know yet, not what they’ve already figured out.

(Recognise that pattern, anyone?)

The audience shift is real. People are exhausted by the performative expert. The one who shows up with a framework for everything, a neat lesson from every failure, and an aesthetic carousel to match. That content no longer feels trustworthy. It feels like a product.

What feels trustworthy now? Someone is working through a problem in front of you. Thinking out loud. Getting it wrong sometimes. Saying “I don’t know yet, but here’s what I’m testing.”

It’s messy. It’s not scalable. It’s extremely hard to fake with AI.

Which is exactly why it works.

One-off paid posts. Vanity metrics. “Reach” as a measure of success. All of it is collapsing.

Brands are catching on. The transactional model, pay a creator to promote your product, measure impressions, move on, doesn’t work when audiences have developed a finely tuned bullshit detector for inauthentic endorsement.

What’s replacing it? Long-term partnerships. Co-created products. Revenue sharing. Equity deals. Brands don’t want creators to promote them. They want creators to become them.

Which means the creators who win aren’t the ones with the biggest audience. They’re the ones with the most credible voice in a specific space. The ones whose recommendation actually shifts buying behaviour because the audience trusts them at a level that a sponsored post can’t manufacture.

Sound familiar? It’s the same principle that’s driving every other shift in this article.

Distinctiveness. Credibility. Voice.

Not reach. Not volume. Not “content.”

If you’re a founder or consultant who’s built your visibility on a rented platform and let’s be honest, that’s nearly all of us... here’s what’s happening in plain English:

The platforms are getting smarter about what they promote. And they’re all converging on the same answer: genuine expertise, expressed in a distinctive voice, from someone with a track record that matches their claims.

Everything else is getting demoted. Slowly on some platforms. Violently on others.

Which means the founders who will own their space in 2026 aren’t the ones posting the most. They’re the ones who’ve done the work of figuring out what they actually sound like. What they actually believe. What they know that nobody else in their market can say with the same specificity.

And... here’s the part I care about professionally, they’re the ones building owned infrastructure alongside their platform presence. Email lists. Newsletters. Communities they control. Because the one thing every trend in this article has in common is this: the platforms can change the rules whenever they want.

The founders who treated social media as their entire distribution strategy are learning this the hard way right now. The ones who built owned channels alongside their platform presence are sleeping fine.

Your voice is the asset. The platform is the amplifier. And amplifiers can be switched off.

Build something that works even when they do.

Or keep optimising for an algorithm that stopped caring about your hook templates six weeks ago.

Your call.

Written by Sarra Richmond, The Ghost.

I write the posts your favourite founders get credit for. Find me → linkedin.com/in/meetsarra