As Director of Growth at Buffer, I spend a significant amount of time tracking SEO and, more recently, AEO trends. In practice, that means closely watching where AI search engines source their answers. The most dramatic change I've noticed in the past few months is LinkedIn's rise. In just a quarter, it went from being outside the top 20 to ranking #5 on ChatGPT for professional queries, based on new research from Profound, a platform that monitors how brands and domains are cited across LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Across the major AI search tools, it's now the single most-cited domain.
If you're building a B2B or tech company, your future customers are already forming their first impressions on LinkedIn, even though most businesses haven't caught on yet. Many questions that once began with a Google search now start with an AI prompt, and the responses those tools generate determine which businesses make the algorithm's shortlist.
What's fueling that #1 ranking is even more important than the ranking itself. The companies actively publishing on LinkedIn today are the ones AI engines are learning to reference, creating a compounding edge for early movers. The upside: this shift is still in its early days, and in this article we'll walk through how you can take advantage of it.
Jump to a section: The short answer • What's driving the citations • My theory on why LinkedIn became the source AI engines rely on • 5 reasons your LinkedIn might not be…