Everyone is still doing this.
Stuffing their headline with every keyword they can fit. Cramming their About section with industry terms stacked on top of each other like they’re building a LinkedIn SEO sandwich. Skills section loaded up with 60+ entries because someone told them more is more.
And honestly? I’m bored AF.
Not bored in the “I’ve seen this before” way. Bored in the “I landed on your profile and left in four seconds because it read like a job description wrote itself” way.
Yawn
Look, I get it. Keyword anxiety is real. And somewhat warranted. But what’s not warranted is the compulsive rearranging, the obsessive adding, the panicked Googling of “best LinkedIn keywords for [industry].” People spend hours on this. Hours they could spend telling an actual story about what they do and why it matters.
But they don’t. Because someone told them the algorithm only cares about keywords.
That someone was wrong. Or, more precisely, that someone was right in 2022.
Why does keyword stuffing on LinkedIn still happen?
Because the advice hasn’t caught up.
Career coaches, resume writers, and even some LinkedIn “experts” are still telling people to stuff keywords everywhere. Headline, About, Experience, Skills — every available space. Sounds familiar? (It should. I wrote about the supply chain analyst whose career coach told him exactly this.)
The logic was simple: LinkedIn’s search worked like Google circa 2010. More keywords = more visibility. And for a while, it sort of did.
But LinkedIn doesn’t work like that anymore, especially after the big LinkedIn algo update in 2025. LinkedIn’s AI doesn’t just count keywords. It reads context. It evaluates expertise signals across your entire profile: your posts, your engagement, your recommendations, the consistency between what you claim and what your activity demonstrates.
It’s looking for signal, not volume.
Stuffing “supply chain” into every bullet point doesn’t make you a supply chain expert anymore than knowing how to drive a car makes you an aerospace engineer. It makes you someone who typed “supply chain” a lot.
What does LinkedIn’s AI actually look for in a profile?
Here’s what changed, and what the keyword-anxiety crowd hasn’t absorbed yet.
LinkedIn’s AI is evaluating expertise, not keyword density. Most notably, it’s looking at whether your profile backs up the things you claim. Keywords with no there-there ARE the emperor with no clothes.
(IYKYK. If you don’t, it’s a really weird analogy you should look up.)
Keywords still matter. But they matter the way a name tag matters at a conference — it gets someone to walk over. What happens after that is the conversation.
And right now, most profiles are all name tag and no conversation.
Is obsessing over LinkedIn keywords actually hurting your profile?
Yes. In two ways.
First, it’s costing you the human. A recruiter, a potential client, a partnership lead — they land on your profile and see a wall of keywords formatted as a list. No narrative. No personality. No reason to keep reading.
The result? They bounce. The algorithm surfaced you, and the human dismissed you, which is arguably worse than never being found at all.
Second, the obsession itself is a distraction. Every hour spent rearranging keywords is an hour not spent on the work that actually moves the needle: writing a headline that stops the scroll, planning a Featured section that highlights your best work and takes your audience on the journey you want them to take, building an Experience section that shows impact instead of listing tasks.
Keyword anxiety is busywork disguised as strategy. It feels productive. It is not.
How should you actually use keywords on your LinkedIn profile?
Naturally. That’s it. That’s the whole answer.
Put them where they make sense in a sentence or a phrase: About section, Experience entries, case studies in your Projects section. Sometimes, but not always, in your headline or on your banner.
Create the narratives that humans want to read. LinkedIn’s AI is smart enough to find them when they’re placed naturally and to derive context. You don’t need to hand-deliver them in a bulleted list with a neon sign.
What you need is a profile that works for both audiences. The AI that decides whether you show up, and the human who decides whether you matter.
(I’ve been saying this for a while. Optimize for AI and the human eye. It rhymes, which means I get to keep it.)
The real problem with keyword lists on LinkedIn
Here’s what nobody talks about.
I write lists every day. Project lists, task lists, grocery lists, client lists. Lists are work. Lists are obligations. Lists are the thing I get through so I can get to the thing I actually care about.
Your profile should not feel like my Tuesday afternoon.
Tell me a story. Tell me about the problem you walked into and what it looked like when you walked out. Tell me about the thing you built that didn’t exist before you got there. Tell me about the client who came back three times because you were the only one who understood what they actually needed.
That is what makes me stop scrolling. That is what makes me click “Connect.” That is what makes me remember your name when someone asks me, “Do you know anyone who does [thing]?”
A list of keywords does none of that. A list of keywords is forgettable before I finish reading it.
Your keywords may get you found. But your story gets you chosen.
Stop anxiously rearranging the name tag and start having the conversation.