There is a version of you being assembled by AI right now. You did not write it.
In the early days of Facebook, we’d often hear people say things like, “well, no one will be able to run for office with this many photos online.” “That’s strange,” 21-year-old me would think as I uploaded 117 photos to a Facebook album.
Today, if you have not authored your story, you are letting a machine hallucinate one. Or at best, pull outdated information about you (or anyone who shares your name) from whatever dregs of the internet it can scrape together.
What the algorithm is actually using
Think about what exists for your digital footprint right now. A conference bio you forgot existed. A Glassdoor review from three jobs ago. Your LinkedIn headline. A Reddit thread you commented on once. And that’s not counting the other people with your name, or a name close to yours, who get pulled in alongside you.
You might think you don’t care how AI is presenting you, but if you’re applying for a job, you will. 47% of employers say if they can’t find you online, they won’t call you.1 And 86% are looking you up before they make that call.2 The internet has always been the first impression. What’s changed is everything underneath. Google is no longer the only search engine, and the job search process itself is no longer built around a human reading your resume.
In a market where applications have doubled since 20223 and recruiters are buried, your online presence is the file the system opens before any human sees you.
Who is writing your story right now?
You have three options for telling your story digitally:
- You write it.
- Someone else writes it (a recruiter, a journalist, an old boss, a podcast host).
- An algorithm assembles it from leftover scraps.
LinkedIn was built for distribution, and it does it well. The long-form posts get cited. The newsletters reach real audiences. The connections drive opportunity. What it was not built for is your story. A post that goes up today is buried by next month, and an article from 18 months ago lives one click deep on a profile that was never designed to hold a body of work together.
LinkedIn more than doubled its domain rank on ChatGPT between December 2025 and February 2026, becoming the fifth most-cited source. But long-form posts, newsletters, and articles drive 60% of those citations.4 Your profile bullet points are not what gets cited. LinkedIn blocks third-party scraping and has no public API for profile data, so the only thing AI can read is what you’ve put out in the open.
If you’re not consistently writing longer-form content, your LinkedIn profile only tells the algorithm your linear job history. It does not tell it what you’ve done, how you think, or why anyone should trust you.
A case to start capturing your work
Our pace of work is ever-increasing, and most of us will forget the details of what we did, what the outcomes were, and who was in the room. If you find yourself interviewing for a job, it’s hard to recall those things on the spot. That’s assuming you make it to the interview in the first place.
Judgment is the new moat. AI has made it cheap to produce work. It has not made it cheap to know what work is worth producing, when to push back on the model, or how to decide what good looks like. Show your agentic work. Show what you delegated, what you kept, and why. Explain your process, your judgment, the outcomes. The things that separate an exceptional candidate from someone who just uses AI to build a grocery list.
What used to feel like vanity or puffery is now a necessity. It’s preservation.You are going to be summarized whether you participate or not. The only thing left to decide is whose words the summary uses. I’d suggest you write them.
1 Apollo Technical, “Social Media Recruiting Statistics” (citing CareerBuilder), 2026. 2 Digital Footprint Check, “Employer Social Media Screening”, 2026. 3 The Interview Guys, “The Job Search Paradox”, 2026. 4 Limelight Marketing Systems, “LinkedIn Algorithm Changes 2026: Personal Branding & AI Visibility”, 2026.