LinkedIn Visibility: You Can’t Automate Being Known

You Can’t Automate Being Known

[00:00] LinkedIn’s New “AI Slop” Button

Karen: So let’s talk about this new button that LinkedIn just released.

I actually shifted my episodes around because a couple of days ago, LinkedIn added a new button to every single post in your feed. You click the three little dots in the corner, and one of the things you can now choose is, “This seems like AI slop.”

So sit with that for a second.

LinkedIn — the most buttoned-up, blazer-and-headshot professional platform on the entire internet — just gave every single user a button to report that the thing they’re reading is likely fake.

They’re not doing this for fun.

They’re doing this because something like 40% of long posts on LinkedIn — the thoughtful-looking ones with a little story and then a lesson, with line breaks and one-word paragraphs for emphasis — were reportedly written by a machine, not by a person.

By a robot.

In about four seconds, while somebody got up and made themselves a cup of tea, right?

And in the same breath, LinkedIn has quietly started pulling its own little “Make My Post Sound Better” AI button.

They built this button, right? They looked at what it did to the feed and went, “Yeah, let’s take that back.”

So here’s what’s about to happen: every marketing expert with a newsletter is about to lose their mind about this, right?

Because the robots won.

Everything’s fake now, right?

And I want to tell you the truth: when I read that headline, I felt relief.

I felt relief because this is the thing I’ve been standing on. I’ve been behind this microphone telling you this for years.

The thing that sounded a little soft, a little slow, a little Karen — “Why won’t you just give us the growth hack?” — the thing that just went from a nice idea to the only idea left standing is this:

You cannot automate being known.

That’s it. That’s the episode for today.

But let me dive in a little bit and show you why this is the best news that you’re getting all year long.

[02:00] LinkedIn Just Changed the Visibility Game

Karen: Welcome back to the Good Girls Get Rich podcast.

As I’m recording this, it’s August 2026, and we’ve been talking about getting seen and getting known.

Last week, I gave you a ritual, right?

Twenty minutes, a couple times a week. Quiet and steady. Human to human.

When I recorded that, I was teaching you the smart way to show up.

This week, the platform actually confirmed what I’ve been saying.

It changed the math on everybody.

Now it’s not only the smart way to behave on LinkedIn. It’s the only way that’s still going to work.

So this button that LinkedIn is giving us to flag a post as fake is LinkedIn admitting two things, from what I can tell:

The feed is full of machine writing.

And LinkedIn can’t reliably tell which is which, so they’re asking us.

When a platform is outsourcing, “Is this even real?” to its users, where’s the trust?

Where’s that trust?

The study that everybody’s quoting is saying things like 40% of long-form posts are fully AI-written.

Take that with a grain of salt because you don’t really need the number.

You need the button.

And the button is the platform telling you itself.

You’ve got years, decades, of real experience, and you’re spending a year being told to win by posting more and feeding the machine.

That advice just died.

You need to be yourself.

You need to be yourself.

When anybody can make a polished, thoughtful, organized-sounding post in four seconds for free, it’s worth what it costs to make.

What is that worth?

It’s worth nothing.

The minute the machine can do the thing, the thing stops being proof of you being pretty smart.

Now it just signals that you know how to use tools.

Listen, I love these tools, so we’re going to get to that.

But just know that every hour you’re spending trying to feel more impressive, you’re competing with the machine that everybody else is using.

Don’t play that game.

Don’t play that game.

Be you.

Be disruptive.

Be yourself.

Let your freak flag fly.

[04:31] Visibility Isn’t the Same as Being Known

Karen: It’s what I’ve been talking about forever and ever and ever.

We’ve been talking about things like vanity visibility — visibility that’s like applause with no calls on your calendar.

This is that on steroids.

The game was already counterfeit.

Now it’s saying, “Yo, this robot plays better than you, so let’s change it.”

So here’s the thing.

I’m not calling out the women who are posting every day because you were told to do this.

Every expert says consistency means volume. It means posting.

You did the assignment.

But the assignment changed.

And that’s not on you.

So we’re just going back to our roots.

Those beautiful, polished posts aren’t necessarily what matters.

Your reach is full of robots.

The platform itself is asking us to flag it.

What’s left?

What’s left?

There’s one thing that we cannot automate.

And that’s human-to-human connection.

Specific humans who actually know specific human you.

Not just follow you.

Know you.

Know what you do, what you do it for, and who you are.

The machine can write the post, but it can’t be you.

And listen, if you’re my client, if you’ve been in the Visibility Salon or any of the programs that we run here, I have been saying forever:

Nobody ever logs into my LinkedIn account but me.

I’ve got a team. I’ve got people who help me with things.

But nobody ever logs into my LinkedIn account but me.

Because if I’m chatting with you on LinkedIn, you want to believe it’s me.

So I want it to be me.

I’ve had clients who bucked me on that, and then they were like, “Karen, this person says it doesn’t sound like me.”

I’m like, “Yeah, because it’s not you. That’s why.”

Being you is now the whole game.

[06:40] How Karen Uses AI Without Losing Her Voice

Karen: Let me tell you a little bit about what I’m doing because I don’t want to pretend that I’m above all this.

I use AI tools every single day of my life.

There are so many places in my life where I use these tools.

But come on, you guys know this.

Maybe you’ve done this in ChatGPT or whatever.

It says, “A, B, C, and D is great,” and you go, “I don’t know about D.”

And it goes, “You’re so right, Karen. D wasn’t the right answer.”

Like, well, if D wasn’t the right answer, why did you tell me it was in the first place?

Right?

So we know.

I’m sure that’s happened to you as well.

I use AI.

I’m not wagging my finger at a tool — a tool that I use 100 times a day.

Anyone who says they handwrite every word and never touches AI is either lying or doesn’t have enough to do.

The machine helps me say it.

But it can never be the relationship.

Maybe I’ll have AI outline something for me, and a lot of times it comes up with things that I didn’t think of.

I’m like, “Oh my God, I love that.”

Then I rephrase it.

I make it my own words.

I change it so that it’s my point of view.

I read everything out loud before I post anything because I want to make sure it feels like me.

The machine can help me understand what I want to say.

But it cannot be the relationship.

When I send a note to somebody, a real person reads it.

They need to know that this real person wrote it.

And that’s the line.

That’s the line that I don’t want to cross.

[08:19] Why Mass LinkedIn DMs Don’t Work

Karen: I’ve tried these other tools.

You know, you get these mass DMs all the time.

Don’t pretend I don’t try them.

I’m going to couch that by saying I try them so I can help you understand whether you should use them or not.

But I’ve never found a reason to do that.

Sometimes I’ll message somebody something, and I’ll see the previous message, and I’m like, “Ugh, that was part of that test that I did. I hate that I sent that message to that person.”

But it is what it is.

I try this stuff.

I’ve tried these things, and I stopped because it just doesn’t work.

It just doesn’t work.

I remember, I don’t know, a year or so ago, somebody reached out to me for private consulting.

They were a sales rep. They generated leads for their boss.

It turned out I knew who his boss was. His boss used to be a client of mine, so I knew his boss well.

His boss was personable and could close. He could sell ice to Eskimos. The guy was great.

The sales rep said, “I’m putting 50 calls a week on his calendar.”

And none of them were closing.

“LinkedIn just doesn’t work because he’s not closing these calls.”

I’m like, “Dude, I know your boss. Your boss should be closing 49 out of 50 calls you’re putting on his calendar.”

The problem is you.

He even said, “Great leads. I’m giving him free, great 50 leads.”

I’m like, “How great can they be if he’s not closing any of them?”

These tools are wasting our time because they’re putting leads on our calendar, and that feels like it’s a great lead.

Maybe you even close one a week when you weren’t closing one a week before, so you feel like it’s working.

But you’re talking to 49 of the wrong people every single week.

That’s it.

It got so real for me.

I can’t even tell you how many people have come to me after trying tools like that, after wasting hours and hours and hours of their time.

[10:40] Borrow the Stage Instead of Chasing the Algorithm

Karen: When you’re at a conference and you’re on a real stage — you’ve heard me talking a lot lately about borrowing the stage — when you’re on a real stage in front of real people with real applause, that’s the money.

That’s the money.

And we know it.

It’s not just the applause that we’re looking for.

It’s the follow-up on the other side of that talk.

It’s the conversations that we have on the other side of these rooms.

Because the online rooms that are full of applause are now half robots.

There’s still only one conversation that’s going to pay you.

But now we have to weed through the robots to get there.

So when I tell you, when I beg you, to stop performing for the algorithm and just be known by actual people and have actual conversations, I’m not just being noble.

I’m telling you what I do.

I’m telling you what my line is.

And I’m telling you what shows up on my calendar.

These are the things that still work.

And let me just tell you something.

If you’re watching this on YouTube, you can take one look at me and know I’ve been around a while.

This stuff worked well before social media.

Well before social media, it was, “Who do you know?”

“Who do I need to know to be able to get to my next big, fat, juicy contract?”

That happened before social media.

And it’s still the case today.

[12:06] 40 Real Relationships Are Worth More Than 10,000 Followers

Karen: Last week, we talked about 40 real relationships instead of an audience of a million people.

Which was the smarter play?

We were saying this is what you really need to do this week.

It’s the lifeboat.

Because when the water’s full of complete fakes, the only things that float are the humans that know you.

Forty humans who actually know you can’t be counterfeited.

Ten thousand followers can.

We know that some number of them literally aren’t real.

And I’ve experienced that personally.

Maybe you have as well.

I remember talking to one person at one point, and I got behind the scenes with somebody else in his organization.

He said, “Yeah, Karen, they have created 100 LinkedIn profiles that are all fake, and then they’re just pitching all over the place.”

I knew this happened, but to have somebody actually tell me who was doing this and how they were doing it was eye-opening.

They all kind of had the same company name.

That’s how I knew they were fake.

It was eye-opening to me.

So understand:

It’s great to be recognized.

It’s better to be known.

Your name in a feed that nobody trusts anymore is not helping you.

But to be known by a specific person who’s going to take your call, who’s going to put a call on your calendar — it’s hard to fake that human-to-human conversation.

[14:15] Be Unmistakably Human on LinkedIn

Karen: What if your best-written LinkedIn post is now a liability?

What if it reads like all polish and none of your personality?

None of your fingerprints are on it.

Because what’s going to happen is the algorithm is going to bury it, and people aren’t even going to look at it.

So the safest thing, the best thing, the best way to put calls on your calendar, is to be unmistakably, specifically, messily, messily, messily human.

That’s how you can shine on LinkedIn right now.

And here’s the thing.

Maybe you’re looking at this going, “Okay, that’s it. I’m done with LinkedIn.”

No, no, no.

This is where you need to be more than ever now.

Because now we know we’re talking to humans.

Now we know we’re talking to more humans because LinkedIn is saying, “Help us. Help us keep this human to human.”

So if you haven’t, we’ll link to last week’s episode.

Go back to that 20 minutes a couple times a week.

That hasn’t changed.

But now I want you to make sure you’re doubling down on the 10 or 15 real humans you’re trying to actually be known by.

We already know the machine is flooding the feed.

But it can’t sit in on those real relationships with your people.

That’s still the work that’s yours.

It’s still the work that pays well.

It’s the work that pays really well.

You know that I want there to be more wealthy women in the world.

I think women with money are what can change this world.

This is where the money is:

The human-to-human relationships on LinkedIn.

[15:47] Your Assignment: Send One Message a Robot Couldn’t Send

Karen: We’re not talking about a content plan this week.

Double down on the work we did last week.

I don’t want to give you more work because that work we did last week is plenty.

And then, as you’re creating content — because you do still have to create content — I want you to think:

Could a machine have sent this exact note to 100 people?

Or could my competitors drop this exact note into their feed?

If yes, it’s wrong.

If it only makes sense to your next client, that’s the whole thing.

That’s the whole thing.

And many aren’t going to reply fast.

Again, we’re not running a campaign here.

You’re being a person.

Talk to a couple humans a week.

Get the big, fat, juicy clients.

Make the big money.

That’s how this works.

[16:45] You Can’t Automate Being Known

Karen: So let me leave you with this on the button.

LinkedIn built a button this week so that you could report that the thing you’re reading isn’t real.

And so many people out there are talking about this being a catastrophe.

“The robots won. Content’s dead. Pack it up. Go home. Call it a day.”

I need you to flip this.

I need you to hear this another way.

Because for years, the loudest advice in your ear has been:

Post more.

Be everywhere.

Feed the machine.

Grow the number.

The algorithm is what matters.

And this week, the machine is admitting to be full of actual machines.

So stop worrying about being impressive because impressive is kind of off the table now.

Be messy.

Be you.

Let that freak flag fly.

What’s left is what they can’t do.

They can write the post.

But they can’t be you.

They can’t sit in on those real relationships with real people who spent 20, 30, 40, 50 years getting good at something.

They can’t be known.

You can’t automate being known.

All right.

So pick a couple people this week.

Send people a message that a robot never could.

Maybe it’s a memory of something that you did together.

Or a real reaction to something.

Or your point of view on something.

Maybe they’re posting about something that has happened to you as well.

Something that will only make sense to that person as it relates to you.

And if you’re sitting there thinking, “Okay, Karen, but still, the people I need to know me don’t know I exist yet.”

That is the exact reason I built my free masterclass called Bar the Stage.

It’s a whole method for how to get in front of the right audiences that already exist.

You don’t have to create the audiences.

You can have a tiny little email list and do this.

A tiny little LinkedIn network and do this.

And you can turn other people’s audiences into real people who can hire you, human to human.

The way that still works.

It’s free. It runs about an hour.

You can check it out at sheslinkedup.com/masterclasses.

Of course, it’s in the show notes.

Check it out.

See what you think about it.

Because again, getting in front of other people’s audiences is a way to build your relationship with more humans.

Keep it up.

You’re doing good.

I’m here for you.

I’ll see you next week.