If you've noticed your LinkedIn reach feeling different lately, you're not imagining things.
LinkedIn has quietly rolled out a significant shift in how it determines who sees what content. It's called 360Brew (The AI Engine Behind Your Feed) and understanding what it actually is could change how you think about your entire LinkedIn strategy.
Here's what's really happening behind the scenes and why it matters for your business.
360 BREW is LinkedIn's new AI-powered foundation model for personalized ranking and recommendation. We're talking about a 150 billion parameter decoder-only model that LinkedIn's Foundation AI Technologies team has been building.
This isn't a simple algorithm update. It's a complete replacement of how LinkedIn decides what content to show each user.
The "360" refers to a holistic, 360-degree view of your entire professional presence on the platform. Your profile, your posts, your comments, your network connections, your interaction history. Everything gets analyzed together including your posts, comments, profile, and network.
The "Brew" aspect describes how the AI blends hundreds of signals together to create genuinely personalized feeds for each user.
This isn't just another algorithm tweak. It's a complete rethink of how LinkedIn decides what content deserves visibility.
The old approach rewarded volume and surface-level engagement.
Post frequently, get likes, and your content would spread.
360Brew doesn't just count your likes and comments. It understands them semantically and understands context. It recognizes patterns in behavior. It predicts what specific users will find valuable based on their unique history. It looks at the actual substance of what you're saying rather than just keywords.
It evaluates whether your content aligns with your established expertise. And critically, it measures how valuable your audience actually finds your content based on their behavior.
According to LinkedIn's research paper from their Foundation AI Technologies team
"Professional value is multi-dimensional. Our model aligns discovery with quality, not quantity of engagement."
That single sentence should change how you think about your entire LinkedIn strategy.
The Techy: How It Works
The old LinkedIn algorithm operated on relatively simple feature engineering. Likes counted for X points. Comments counted for Y points. Posts got scored and distributed based on these weighted calculations.
360Brew operates completely differently.
The AI model takes three main inputs for every ranking decision: the member's profile information (converted to text), the member's historical interactions (what they've clicked, liked, saved, commented on, applied to), and the content itself (post text, job description, etc.).
Then it uses in-context learning to identify patterns. If a user consistently engages deeply with posts about B2B sales strategies but scrolls past generic motivation content, 360Brew recognizes this pattern. The AI then predicts: will this specific user find this specific piece of content valuable enough to engage with?
This is personalization at a completely different level than before. The model essentially creates a personalized prediction for each member based on their unique profile and behavior history.
What makes this powerful is the semantic understanding. 360Brew doesn't just see that you clicked on something. It understands what that click meant in the context of your professional identity and interests. A marketing consultant clicking on a post about email sequences tells the model something different than an HR director clicking on the same post.
Why Your Engagement Signals Matter More Than Ever
Here's where it gets practical for content creators.
360Brew learns from engagement signals to make its predictions. The behaviors people exhibit around your content become the training data that tells the AI whether your content is valuable to specific audiences.
This is why I remember it using B-R-E-W:
B stands for Behavior. Every action someone takes gets logged and analyzed. Clicks, saves, comments, shares, DM conversations that start from your posts, and whether they send you connection requests after reading your post. 360 Brew sees all of these as signals about your content's value.
R stands for Relevance. Does your content match what your specific audience actually wants? 360Brew examines the alignment between your profile, your content topics, and the interests of people in your network. If you post marketing content to an audience of accountants, the AI recognizes that mismatch. If your profile says business consultant but you post about cryptocurrency, the model notices the inconsistency.
E stands for Engagement Quality. Not just volume of engagement, but the depth and meaning behind it. 360Brew can distinguish between a "Great post!" comment and a thoughtful response that adds to the conversation. Posts with over 50% of comments receiving replies see up to 30% more reach because those conversations signal genuine value.
W stands for Watch/Read Time. This is dwell time, and it's become absolutely critical. How long people spend consuming your content before scrolling away. LinkedIn tracks this in two phases: time spent reading the visible portion above "see more," and time spent reading the full expanded post.
Lets Dive a Bit into Dwell Time
Here's why this matters more than you might realize.
LinkedIn now tracks two distinct phases of dwell time. The first phase measures time spent reading the visible portion of your post, which is everything above the "see more" button. The second phase measures time spent reading the complete post after someone clicks to expand it.
If someone scrolls past your post in two seconds, that tells LinkedIn something.
If someone stops, clicks "see more," and spends ninety seconds reading your entire post, that tells LinkedIn something completely different.
And now, that second scenario gets rewarded significantly more than it used to.
This shift means the content that performs best is content that people actually want to read all the way through.
-Not content that tricks people into clicking.
-Not content that generates reflexive likes.
-Content that delivers enough value that busy professionals choose to spend their limited attention on it.
Why Your Long Carousel Might Be Hurting You
Carousels still perform relatively well compared to other formats, but they're losing their dominant position.
Here's what's actually happening: 360Brew measures not just that someone swiped through slides, but whether they completed the carousel and what that completion pattern signals about the content's value.
A twenty-slide carousel that people abandon after slide seven used to signal to the LinkedIn algorithm that the post had good engagement. In other words, it was a way to trick the system into thinking the content was high value. Now it sends a very different and specific signal to the AI: this content hooked attention but did not sustain it, which the system interprets as low value.
The key insight: 360Brew interprets completion patterns as indicators of content quality. A post that someone reads fully signals higher value than content that gets abandoned partway through.
The Profile-Content-Network Alignment
360Brew examines three things in alignment: your profile, your content topics, and your network's interests.
If your profile says you're a business growth strategist, your content focuses on LinkedIn strategy, and your network consists of entrepreneurs and service providers, 360Brew sees perfect alignment. The AI recognizes you as an authority in that space and distributes your content more confidently to similar audiences.
If there's misalignment anywhere in that triangle, 360Brew becomes less certain about who should see your content. The predictions become less confident and reach typically suffers.
This rewards specialists dramatically over generalists. The more clearly defined your expertise lane, the more confidently 360Brew can match your content to the right audiences.
Consistency matters here. Posting regularly about your core topics builds your authority signal in the AI's understanding. The model recognizes patterns over time. Sporadic posting on varied topics creates a weaker signal that makes predictions harder.
The Death of Growth Hacks & Decline of the POD people (Thank you LinkedIn)
360Brew essentially kills traditional LinkedIn growth hacks because the AI can recognize patterns that indicate gaming.
Engagement pods become risky. When the same group of people consistently engages with each other's content immediately after posting, 360Brew sees that pattern. The AI can distinguish between organic engagement from genuinely interested users and coordinated engagement from people outside your natural audience.
Hashtags have essentially no impact anymore. LinkedIn disabled hashtag pages in late 2024. Hashtags are no longer clickable on desktop. Including three to five hashtags might help with search discoverability, but they won't expand your reach.
Posting times matter less than before. 360Brew can surface older content if it's more relevant to a specific user. Quality content can gain traction weeks after posting because the AI prioritizes relevance over recency.
The first sixty to ninety minutes still matter for initial testing, but the AI's semantic understanding means good content has longer shelf life than the old algorithm allowed.
Strategic Implications for Service Providers
For solopreneurs, consultants, coaches, and service-based business owners, 360Brew creates genuine advantages over larger competitors.
Large companies can't manufacture the authenticity that 360Brew rewards. They can't scale genuine expertise across dozens of content creators. They can't buy their way to relevance in a system that learns from meaningful engagement patterns.
Your deep expertise in your specific niche matters more than a company's broad marketing budget. Your authentic voice built over years of experience matters more than polished but generic corporate content. Your ability to serve a specific audience with specific solutions matters more than attempts to appeal to everyone.
360Brew's semantic understanding means it can recognize genuine expertise. When you write about your area of specialization, the AI understands the depth and relevance in ways that simple keyword matching never could.
The cold start advantage also helps here. When you create content for niche audiences, 360Brew can recognize the relevance based on profile and content analysis rather than requiring massive historical engagement data. You don't need to go viral to reach the right people.
Practical Implementation
Start with profile-content alignment. Audit your profile to ensure it clearly communicates your area of expertise. Then evaluate your recent content: does it align with what your profile claims? If your profile says business growth strategist but your content mixes personal stories with random motivation quotes, 360Brew sees inconsistency.
Optimize for completion, not clicks. Every piece of content should deliver sustained value that justifies reading to the end. For text posts, stay in the 600 to 1,200 character range with clear structure and strong hooks. For carousels, target twelve slides with twenty-five to fifty words per slide. For videos, aim for one to two minutes with value delivered immediately.
Prioritize conversations over reactions. When people comment substantively, respond with equal substance. Create dialogue. Posts where over half the comments receive thoughtful replies see significantly better reach. The AI interprets these conversations as signals of genuine value.
The algorithm has fundamentally changed. The opportunity for genuine expertise to reach the right audiences has never been better.
Wendy Shore is a Business & LinkedIn™ Growth Strategist, Dynamic Speaker and Best Selling Author dedicated to helping clients build Brand Authority and guiding them to turn expertise into profitable businesses. As a LinkedIn TOP VOICE, she mentors future entrepreneurs and business leaders.