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Should we still be commenting on LinkedIn every day, or is that dead now?
That question came up three times last month and the answer is the same each time. Keep commenting, but stop counting. Volume commenting is finished as a growth tactic, and it was finished before LinkedIn touched the ranking. What killed it is that a third of the comment section is no longer a person. Your team is competing for a slot that is now sorted by relevance, against machines that can produce fifty acceptable replies in the time your strategist writes four.
The number comes from an analysis of 57,000 public LinkedIn posts by AI detection startup Pangram Labs, reported by Social Media Today: "30% of all of the comments posted on LinkedIn between April and June this year were entirely AI-generated." The same week, LinkedIn changed how comments display in the feed to rank them by personal relevance rather than pure recency or volume. LinkedIn also reported an 18% year over year increase in time spent in post comments in Q2, which Social Media Today notes may itself be partly the bots.
Put those together and you get a market where supply of generic commentary went vertical while the shelf space for it got ranked. That is a commodity glut. The response to a commodity glut is never to produce more of the commodity.
Why LinkedIn's comment ranking update broke volume commenting
This applies directly to agency owners between $200k and $2M in revenue who sell engagement as part of a retainer, ghostwriters charging $5k to $30k per month who promised a client daily presence, and founders who were told to spend twenty minutes a day in other people's comment sections. If your team has a documented target of thirty comments a day per account, you are the exact operator this repricing hits, because your entire output now sits in the same bucket as the automated replies LinkedIn is actively filtering.
This is not for you if commenting is something you do occasionally because you had a real reaction to a post. Skip this if you have no client accounts and no team time allocated to engagement, since nothing here changes your cost structure. And if you are still measuring engagement work by comments left per week, this article will not change your model, because the unit you are counting stopped correlating with the outcome you want somewhere around the point where machines started producing it for free.
The uncomfortable part is that most volume commenting never worked in the first place. It looked like it worked because it produced visible activity and activity is easy to report on. A monthly deck showing 600 comments left is a satisfying artifact. It is also entirely disconnected from whether anyone qualified now knows who your client is. This is the same measurement trap that shows up when teams grade LinkedIn by the numbers their analytics dashboard happens to display, and the comment glut has just made the gap between activity and outcome impossible to hide.
The Second Sentence Rule
Here is what I would actually do. Apply what I call the Second Sentence Rule. A comment earns its place only if the second sentence could not have been written by someone who had not lived the thing being discussed. The first sentence can be agreement, framing, whatever gets you into the thought. The second sentence has to carry information the author of the post does not already have.
That means a number from your client's operation, a case where the post's advice failed, a distinction the post flattened, or a specific counterexample with enough detail that a stranger reading it learns something. If the second sentence is a restatement of the post, a compliment, or a general principle, delete the comment. It is not going to rank, and more importantly it is not going to be read by the one person in that thread who could become a client.
The math changes when you apply this. A strategist who was leaving thirty comments a day now leaves four or five, and each one takes six to eight minutes because it requires pulling something real from the client's business. Across a 3 person team covering ten accounts, that is a meaningful reallocation. It also means your engagement work becomes a byproduct of the same voice extraction that feeds your posts, instead of a separate task that a junior does while half watching something else.
What you lose is the reporting artifact. Nobody is impressed by five comments. What you gain is that each of those five is legible as human in a feed that is now 30% machine, ranked by a system explicitly trying to surface personal relevance, and read by people who have become very good at pattern-matching filler. Scarcity is doing the work that volume used to pretend to do.
There is a second-order effect worth naming. As the comment section fills with generated agreement, the cost of being specific in public goes down and the return goes up. Six months ago a sharp, slightly contrarian comment competed with a hundred other sharp comments. Now it competes with a hundred variations of "great point, this really resonates." That is a wider gap than most operators have had access to in years, and it will close as soon as enough people notice.
The trajectory question for your business is whether your engagement offer survives contact with a client who reads the Pangram number. If what you sell is presence measured in activity, you are selling something a bot does cheaper and a platform is filtering harder. If what you sell is a person who understands the client's business well enough to say something only they could say, the glut is working in your favor. Most agencies will spend the next two quarters trying to automate their way back to the old volume. The ones who go the other direction will be the only human voices in a room that got very loud and very empty at the same time.
