LinkedIn’s 2026 algorithm update handed even more power to individual member pages and further reduced the traction of corporate broadcasts. Here, Richard Stone, founder of automation PR agency Stone Junction, explains what the collapse in company page reach means for brands and how to restructure before the gap widens further.
The data is unambiguous; LinkedIn restructured its algorithm to prioritise personal profiles over company pages, and organic reach for company pages dropped by 60 to 66 per cent as a result. Pages now receive approximately five per cent of user feed allocation.
This fluctuation doesn’t resolve with better posting frequency or sharper creative. According to the Algorithm InSights 2025 Report, organic posts from company pages now reach only around 1.6 per cent of their followers, and company page content accounts for roughly one to two per cent of the overall LinkedIn feed.
The engagement gap makes it worse; Socialinsider’s Q1 2026 data puts the LinkedIn engagement median at around 4.7 per cent for personal-profile content versus approximately one to two per cent for company pages.
Richard van der Blom’s 2025 analysis of 1,800,000 posts shows the mechanism behind it: posts that attract three or more commenters within the first 60 minutes receive approximately 5.2x reach amplification. Personal profiles generate that kind of response because peers comment on them. Brand pages, largely, do not.
For engineering, science and technology marketing managers who have spent years building company page followings, the instinct is to post more, sharpen captions and test formats. None of that touches the underlying problem.
What the algorithm actually rewards
LinkedIn’s updated algorithm, known internally as 360Brew, operates on a depth-scoring model rather than the engagement-volume model most marketers still optimise for. Reading time, back-and-forth in the comments, saves and direct shares now carry the weight. Surface signals like reactions carry less than they did a year ago. For instance, a post that generates 20 substantive comments outperforms one with 200 likes in algorithmic distribution.
Saves and sends have become primary engagement signals because they correlate more directly with buyer intent. Marketing teams reporting on content performance should be tracking these alongside impressions. They are a cleaner signal that the right people are reading.
Format also matters more than most marketers currently recognise. Document posts, the PDF carousels, lead with a 6.60 per cent average engagement rate, the highest of any format on the platform. Native video follows at 5.60 per cent. Text-only posts average around two per cent. Posts with external links receive approximately 60 per cent less reach than posts without them.
That last point is where a lot of engineering, science and technology companies are losing ground. Press coverage, case studies, white papers; every outbound link carries an automatic reach penalty. The practical response is to bring the value into the post itself: summarise the findings and share the most important information there and then on LinkedIn. Moving the link to a first comment used to help, though that workaround has also been penalised as of early 2026.
Rebuilding distribution around people
The obvious response is to treat the company page as infrastructure and put the posting effort into individual profiles: founders, directors, engineers, subject matter experts, the work experience person; whoever you like. Because 85 per cent of purchase requirements are set before a buyer ever requests a meeting, people who are visible during that period are more likely to get the order.
The visibility problem is also converging with another shift. 32 per cent of professionals now discover thought leadership through GenAI tools, and LinkedIn has become a primary data source for AI search engines.
A SEMrush study analysing 89,000 URLs cited by ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode and Perplexity found that LinkedIn is the second most cited domain overall, appearing in 11 per cent of all AI responses. A presence built on named individuals rather than brand pages feeds the social algorithm and the AI citation systems at the same time.
At Stone Junction, we have always done this; prioritising what we have referred to as ‘hero profiles’ over company pages since LinkedIn became a primary social platform.
For engineering, science and technology brands, this is genuinely an opportunity most competitors have not taken seriously yet. Engineering teams have knowledge that buyers are actively looking for. Getting that knowledge into personal LinkedIn posts, attributed to real people with real expertise, is now a distribution decision, a PR decision and an AI visibility decision made in one move.
The companies that understand that will look very different from those that don’t, in about eighteen months from now.
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About Stone Junction: Specialist engineering, science and technology PR agency, Stone Junction is a corporate affiliate member of the CIPR and full member of the PRCA.
The company is based in Stafford, Romania and Germany and boasts a team of 32 consultants who speak fourteen languages between them. As a result, the business can deliver multinational reach in the native language of 20 per cent of the world’s people.
The business has won 73 PR and marketing awards since 2015 and is one of PR Week’s Top 150 UK agencies in the UK. We have 42 clients and they have been with us for an average of six years each.
