October 24, 2026 | Read online
LinkedIn is now cited in AI answers more often than YouTube or Wikipedia.
I had a feeling this was true, but wanted to find out, so I had AI do some research for me. Semrush analyzed 325,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity and found LinkedIn is the #2 most-cited website in AI answers. Profound found it's #1 for professional questions across six different AI platforms.
That got my attention because LinkedIn has been home base for me for a long time. I was member number 36,541, and I've been posting on it constantly ever since.
For a lot of those years, I was trying to be everything to everybody. Back in August, I admitted it in my post on how I've never had a strategy. I was talking to everyone, which meant I was talking to nobody. Since then, every post has to answer one question before it goes out. Is this for Miles, the mid-market AE worried AI is taking the parts of his job he was hired for, or Jordan, the VP of Sales, who can't afford to get the AI decision wrong in public?
Then my COO, Meghan and I started digging into our AEO strategy, which is how AI engines like ChatGPT find and recommend people. The deeper we went, the more LinkedIn kept showing up as one of the places they pull from. That's when the two things connected for me. AI reads LinkedIn to figure out who you are and who you help, and if you're writing for everybody, it can't figure out either one.
It also means a lot of your buyers aren’t looking at your profile anymore. Their AI reads it for them and tells them what it found.
Software is going through the exact same shift, and the tech world has a name for it. It’s called going headless, because nobody needs to look at the screen anymore. The AI goes straight to what’s behind it.
SOFTWARE IS LOSING ITS HEAD
The "head" in software is the interface, the dashboards, and buttons you click through to get anything done. Headless software doesn't need you to open it at all. An AI agent talks to it directly and does the work for you.
Satya Nadella saw this coming back in December 2024, when he described business apps as "essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic" and said: "All that business logic is moving to AI agents."
In May, venture capitalist Navin Chaddha of Mayfield wrote that "The agent interface is the head now." Shopify is already living it. AI agents can now search products across every Shopify merchant from a single connection, build a cart, and, in some cases, complete the checkout without anyone ever loading the store's website.
When the company behind all those storefronts starts building for shoppers who never look at them, I pay attention.
It's happening to us, too. Before a buyer ever gets on a call with you, something has already read about you, and more and more often than not, that something is an AI. G2 surveyed 1,076 B2B software buyers in March, and 51% said they now start their research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google. Seven months earlier, it was 36%. (G2 sells reviews, so take their framing with a grain of salt, but that trend line is hard to ignore.)
Your profile, your posts, and your website have a new reader who never skims and never forgets. What matters now is whether it walks away understanding who you help and why anybody should trust you.
WHAT WE'VE BEEN DOING ABOUT IT
Meghan and I have been working on this for about six months, so I'll walk you through what we did, including the part that hasn't worked yet.
We started by getting crystal clear on one sentence. Every bio, page, and profile I have now carries the same anchor line, "John Barrows helps sales leaders decide whether to replace, rebuild, or retrain their sales team for the AI era." AI engines piece together who you are from everything written about you, and when every source says something slightly different, they get confused. (Gemini still mixes us up with another company, so we're not done.)
Then we rebuilt my LinkedIn profile around that line. The headline, the first few lines of my About section, my Experience description, and my Featured section all say the same thing in the same words.
Then we brought my blog back from the dead (it had been dormant since 2021) and started publishing three times a week, with every post written to answer a question the way Miles or Jordan would actually ask it.
At our 90-day review in August, every major AI engine knew who I was, and that part worked. What hasn't worked as well is showing up when somebody asks about a problem without using my name, like "how do I get my sales team ready for AI?" More blog posts won't fix that. What fixes it is other people talking about you, which I'll come back to.
WRITE FOR YOUR MILES AND JORDAN
None of this works if you don't know who you're writing for, and that's the same work I teach in Filling the Funnel. You define your ideal customer profile, get specific about the personas inside those companies and what keeps them up at night, and then everything you put out speaks to those people, including your profile. You can check out the outbound prospecting guide I put together with Insightly for more details here.
Most people write their About section to sound impressive. The ones who get found write it to answer the question their buyer is already asking.
Your profile is how AI figures out who you are, and your content is what it actually quotes. Profound found that profiles dropped from about 34% of ChatGPT's LinkedIn citations to about 15% in three months, while posts and articles grew. Even still, your profile still has to match what you post, or the AI gets mixed signals about who you are.
The Semrush data on what gets cited is encouraging for anybody who thinks they're too small to matter. About 95% of the cited posts were original, most of them shared practical advice, and most of the authors posted at least five times a month. The median cited post had 15 to 25 reactions. What gets you cited is being consistently useful to a specific person, and anybody can do that.
THE PROMPT PACK
I built a prompt pack that walks you through the whole thing. Upload it to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever AI you use, and it takes you through it one step at a time.
It starts with your ICP and your personas (your own Miles and Jordan), rewrites your headline and About section so they speak to those people and line up with what you post, and then builds a content plan around what AI actually cites.
WHAT OTHER PEOPLE SAY ABOUT YOU
Remember the part that hasn't worked yet? That one comes down to third-party validation.
Last week, I wrote that trust is the one thing AI can't clone. It's also how buyers decide whether to believe what the AI told them. In that same G2 survey, 45% of buyers said a citation from a review site gives them the most confidence in an AI answer, and 64% said they see AI get something wrong at least once a week and go to peer reviews to check it.
That’s the whole strategy around “influencers” and sponsors, and why I’m super selective about who I partner with and put my name on. One that’s relevant to this article is Insightly.
I’ll be upfront that we run on a different CRM, but what Insightly is doing is what every software company is going to have to do. Their CRM can run headless, so you can connect its MCP to Claude, ChatGPT, or Microsoft Copilot and ask questions about your pipeline in plain English without opening a single dashboard. It can update records and create follow-up tasks too. They’ve also earned the other half of the equation with 3rd party reviews and have a 4.2 out of 5 on G2 with almost 1000 reviews. A product that AI can read and real users vouch for is the whole point of this newsletter. The MCP is included on every plan, free trial too, so if you’re running a small or mid-sized team and looking at CRMs.
Lastly, I have a favor to ask. If anything I've written, taught, or said on the podcast has helped you over the years, it would mean the world to me if you could take a few minutes and either write a LinkedIn recommendation on my profile or give me a 5-star review on G2. It helps me get found in all the LLM searches so I can keep finding new clients to help continue to fund the free content I share.
Software can lose its head. Make sure you keep yours.
#MakeItHappen
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