“So what do you actually mean by ‘optimizing’ a profile? Everyone’s got a different definition every year.”
A founder asked me that a while back. Tired. A little snarky about it.
(It was a fair question, honestly.)
And they weren’t wrong. The platform shifts every few months, every “guru” has a new magic trick, and “optimize your LinkedIn profile” has been repeated by so many people that it’s started to mean nothing. Especially since so many are giving generic, outdated advice.
So here’s what I actually mean. And it’s the thing nobody seems to say out loud:
Your LinkedIn profile is talking to two audiences at once. Most of us only know how to talk to one of them.
🔹 There’s the algorithm, LinkedIn’s AI, which decides whether you ever surface in a search, a recruiter’s filter, or someone’s feed. 🔹 And there’s the human, the actual person who lands on your profile and decides — in about the time it takes to read your headline — whether you’re worth their attention.
Two audiences. Two completely different languages. You’re optimizing for AI and the human eye, at the same time. That’s the whole game, and it’s the part the magic-trick crowd skips.
Why does a polished LinkedIn profile still get ignored?
Because polish only speaks to the human. And the human never shows up if the AI didn’t send them.
I see gorgeous profiles all the time. Articulate. Well-written. A real narrative. And no reach, no inbound, nothing. Because every keyword that would’ve helped the algorithm find them is either missing or locked inside a beautifully-worded paragraph the AI doesn’t see, like sitting in a PDF in the Featured section it can’t read at all.
Now flip it. I also see profiles stuffed with every keyword imaginable, technically ranking for everything, and the second a human lands there they bounce. Because it reads like someone is trying to game the system, which is to say it doesn’t read well at all. Or — more often — is so dense that it’s impossible to parse out their professional narrative or what makes them special.
One gets found and ignored. The other gets seen and skipped.
Neither one works unless they BOTH work.
What does it actually mean to optimize for AI?
The AI doesn’t care about your philosophy. It cares about signal. Keywords, recency, and how consistently your expertise shows up across the WHOLE profile. Not just the headline.
That last part trips people up. They stuff the headline and call it done.
(You’ve seen them. “CEO | Founder | Speaker | Disruptor | Visionary | Keyword | Keyword.” So has the algorithm. It is not impressed.)
LinkedIn’s AI crawls everything. Headline, About, Experience, Skills.
Skills! So much more important than anyone realizes.
So the language your audience would actually type to find someone like you needs to live throughout, in context, sounding like a person wrote it.
And fix your foundations while you’re there. Exact company names, linked to real company pages. A gray box where a logo should be reads to the algorithm as a dead link. (I have a whole thing about gray boxes. IYKYK.) A profile full of dead signals is a profile the AI quietly decides not to surface.
The human eye decides fast
Here’s what the keyword crowd forgets: getting found is not the same as getting chosen.
Once a real person lands on your profile, you’ve got a few seconds. They’re not reading. They’re scanning. And they’re looking for two things: proof and personality.
🔹 Proof: can I tell what you do and that you’re good at it? 🔹 Personality: do I want to keep reading, or does this feel like a wall of corporate text generated in someone’s sleep?
This is where the modesty trap finishes people off. They optimize for the algorithm, get found, and then greet the human with “Results-driven professional passionate about leveraging cross-functional synergies.”
Yawn 💤
The human doesn’t need your whole résumé. They need a reason to stay. Short lines. A headline that says something. An About section that opens like a closing argument instead of a throat-clear.
You don’t get to pick one
This is the part nobody wants to hear: It’s not either/or.
Optimize only for the AI and you get views that go nowhere. Optimize only for the human and you build a beautiful profile no one ever finds.
Your keywords get you found. Your story gets you chosen.
One profile, two languages.
If yours only speaks one of them, you’re working twice as hard for half the result. If yours speaks neither, well…
And you probably can’t figure out why it isn’t landing.
That founder eventually got it. The snark dropped the second the two layers clicked. It was never about the latest trick. It was about the language they’d been ignoring.
And a profile that only speaks one language? It’s landing exactly as well as it should.