How to use LinkedIn to get cited and recommended by AI

A few weeks ago I woke up, grabbed my phone in a daze, and checked the time. It was 7:31 AM, but on my lock screen there was a notification from my email. The preview only said: "New meeting booked." I didn't recognize the name of the person who had booked 30 minutes of my time. I checked them out on LinkedIn. We weren't connected. I had no messages from them. They hadn't viewed my profile. They hadn't come from our website because we have a different booking link from there.

So how the hell had this person booked a meeting with me?

When I connected with him and asked him, he said "oh, an AI tool suggested you as a top choice for LinkedIn ghostwriting within life sciences."

Since then, other prospects and people in general have connected with me or reached out and told me that they found me through AI.

AI sources a lot of information about individuals from LinkedIn. It also determines who is an expert on a topic by the quality of what you post and how much you do that.

Since that first booked meeting, I've looked into what AI decides to use to recommend someone or other and what kind of posts AI surfaces when searching for different types of experts (and optimized for it). Below you can find a guide about how to use LinkedIn to get found from AI.

And if you are a founder, CEO, or consultant, I really recommend that you use these tips to make yourself findable.

What AI considers relevant

It is not the number of followers or post engagement. In fact, the way that AI search surfaces and answers is based on three things:

1. How closely it answers the specific query of the user or the search engine.

2. How authoritative it is. It is important that the answer is direct and clear. 

3. If there are signals around it that show that the content came from an expert.

So, if someone types “five biggest experts in NGS”, then anything that answers that as closely as possible will surface.

It’s also not enough to say, "Hey, these are the five biggest experts," and then make sure that your name is on the list. Authority, relevance, and consistency matters. If the description is something like "John Doe, expert in NGS, Italian pizza enjoyer, and semi-professional roller skater," then you are less likely to be recommended as an NGS expert.

Lastly, content engagement, recommendations, or mentions is not that important. Of course, if you can manage to get others to praise you publicly, that's never going to be a bad thing for you.

The two types of ways to be found by AI from LinkedIn

This is one of the most important distinctions, though. There are two main things that can get you found:

1. Your profile and overall content, when people actually ask for recommendations of talent in any given field. This should be your focus because it is a high-intent search.

2. General authority, in short, that AI may surface your posts when they are the best answer to a general query.

Let's be honest: the person who received an answer with my post as a source is very unlikely to actually click on the link. However, the person looking for the best life science LinkedIn ghostwriter clicks on my LinkedIn profile when it appears as one of the top five recommendations. That person is also much more likely to reach out, and it's much more likely to end up having a call with me and hiring my services.

So, focus on surfacing for specific searches with your name and profile.

Profile

Getting found from direct search queries is easy.

The first thing you have to do is optimize your profile. This is 80% of the work. Write a lot and write exactly what you do, who you do it for, in the most direct, authoritative way possible. Then fill your profile with as many true wins and results as you can.

The thing that helped me the most was my LinkedIn headline. I've tried different headlines for a while, but "LinkedIn life science ghostwriter" is completely unbeaten. It makes me surface in both LLMs and in LinkedIn search. Clever headlines are cool, but you won't beat the competition in searches with them. If you can add proof to your headline, that works great as well.

Then, create some content. Even if you don't use LinkedIn much, this helps signal who you are and who you cater to. Consistent posting and blog articles (which you can also do within LinkedIn) will increase your authority massively

One last note: it pays off to be specific. There are thousands of LinkedIn ghostwriters, many of which optimize their profile, and some who are better than me, but I'm not surfacing as a LinkedIn ghostwriter. I'm surfacing as a LinkedIn ghostwriter for life sciences.

So, be specific.

General authority

If you want to surface for general authority, you only have to do one thing, which is to create content that actually answers your prospects' questions.

I post and write about how to do that all the time (and offer 1:1 consulting), so you can learn how to do that in our other blogs. If you don’t know where to start, do so here.

Make sure your content is both in-depth and educational so that the algorithm can recognize you as an expert. These kinds of posts and blogs are also surfaced by Google search.

My LinkedIn + AI optimization checklist

This is an easy-to-go-through checklist to make sure you're surfacing in AI searches for the profile:

1. Make sure that your profile image looks good, your banner looks clean and professional, and write an authority-first, compelling headline that says what you do, being specific. If you have specific results, you can add them to the headline.

2. (Re-)write the rest of your abouz section, work experience, etc. Make sure it's updated, correct, and you add text to showcase your expertise. 

3. Add some links or proof to your featured section. This could be specific posts, a link to your website, or a “book a call” link. This is less relevant for AI search, but more relevant for the people who actually end up on your profile to learn more about you.

And the checklist for content:

1. Make sure that about 80% of your content follows your area(s) of expertise.

2. Make sure it is personal and displays authority and original thinking.

3. If you can run a newsletter or a blog, these types of long-form articles get showcased much more.

That's it. I hope this helps you. Before we say goodbye, I want to take a moment to personally say: I don't believe that you should optimize your profile on LinkedIn only for AI search. I really recommend that you exist on LinkedIn for any other variety of reasons, such as:

• The high volume of people who are there

• The amount of decision makers that spend time on the platform

• The quantity of B2B deals that happen

If you can slightly notch your strategy to make sure that you're being found by AI, I think that's a win-win.

I hope these tips work for you as well as they've worked for me.