If you work in communications, there’s a good chance you’ve spent the last few years doing things on LinkedIn that you knew, deep down, weren’t quite right. 

The platform rewarded behaviours like posting multiple times a day (even when you didn’t need to), and success was measured in likes and impressions rather than whether your audience was finding the content valuable. This behaviour continued, and gradually, for a lot of brands and comms teams, LinkedIn became less about communication and more about keeping up.

That dynamic is now shifting, thanks to a significant and largely unannounced overhaul of how the platform works – 360Brew

In early 2025, LinkedIn began rolling out a new AI-powered ranking and recommendation model called 360Brew – a 150-billion parameter system that replaced thousands of smaller, task-specific algorithms with a single intelligent engine. Most people didn’t know it had happened, instead gradually noticing that content which used to perform well had started to flatline, and assumed something had gone wrong.

Nothing had gone wrong. The platform had just become smarter about what “good” looks like.

Where the old algorithm tracked surface-level signals like likes, comments and early engagement, 360Brew reads content in the way a human would. It understands context and meaning, and it evaluates the coherence of your entire presence on the platform. That includes your profile, your content, your network, your engagement history. It then decides whether your posts are worth putting in front of anyone. 

The question it’s essentially asking is whether everything you do on LinkedIn tells a consistent, credible story about who you are and who you’re trying to reach. If it does, your content finds its audience. If it doesn’t, visibility drops off sharply and no amount of posting frequency will fix it.

What does this mean for communications teams? It’s actually very significant. Many of the tactics that LinkedIn once rewarded (high-frequency posting, engagement pods, hooks engineered to grab attention in the opening line) no longer carry the weight they once did. 360Brew is sophisticated enough to distinguish between genuine engagement and manufactured activity, and it’s been designed specifically to stop rewarding the latter. Content that games its way into someone’s feed is being weeded out in favour of content that earns its place there.

This is a meaningful shift for anyone responsible for a brand’s communications output, because it means that the old approach of chasing reach, optimising for vanity metrics and producing volume at the expense of substance is not just less effective than it used to be. In many cases, it’s actively working against you.

What 360Brew rewards isn’t a new idea. It’s what good communicators have been arguing for throughout the years when the platforms seemed to be pushing in the opposite direction – clear, consistent messaging built around a genuine understanding of your audience, a coherent brand voice that runs through everything you put out, and content that earns attention because it’s actually worth someone’s time rather than because it was scheduled at the statistically optimal moment on a Tuesday morning.

These are the fundamentals that apply to all aspects of communication. The difference now is that they’re embedded into the platform’s infrastructure in a way they weren’t before, which means brands that have been cutting corners are starting to feel it.

If your LinkedIn content isn’t performing the way it used to, the temptation will be to post more or try something different in terms of format. Our advice is to resist that instinct and ask some more useful questions first. 

  • Does your brand have a genuine point of view, and does your content reflect it consistently? 
  • Are you actually talking to the right audience, or broadcasting to whoever happens to be in your network?
  • Is there alignment between your company page and the personal profiles of the people who represent your organisation publicly? 
  • And are you creating content that someone might save and return to, or content that was designed purely to perform well in the short window after it was published?

360Brew is asking those questions on your behalf, and your visibility on the platform is the answer it gives back.

LinkedIn’s shift is a useful reminder that the fundamentals of good communication tend to outlast the platforms and tools that surround them. Audiences respond to clarity and consistency and genuine expertise regardless of what the prevailing algorithm happens to favour, and the brands that build their communications strategies around those principles are rarely the ones caught out when the rules change.

The communicators who will thrive on LinkedIn going forward are not the ones who find a way to crack the new system. They’re the ones who never needed to crack it in the first place – because they were doing the right things all along.