In March, LinkedIn launched an AI assisted growth loop. Fareed Mosavat and I recorded a convo where we broke it down step by step. We were shocked when we looked up the stats. From March to June it went from generating 0 to 1M uniques per month according to Ahrefs and is on one of the steepest growth curves we’ve ever seen for a content loop.

🎙️ Note: Fareed and I are thinking about turning this type of convo into a podcast. Is this something you’d listen to? Let me know on LinkedIn

How LinkedIn’s AI Assisted Content Loop Works

The feature is called a "collaborative article." You may have seen it in your feed. It looks something like this:

That feed item goes to a page that looks like this:

Here is how it works:

LinkedIn is using AI to generate questions about professional topics that will rank in the search engines. They are likely taking keywords that get traffic and then using all the other content on their platform to train a model that generates questions related to this keyword.
They then use AI to generate the structure and headlines of the article.
Additionally, they use AI to generate a paragraph of “starter content” under each headline.
Now here comes the “magic.” They then put that article in the LinkedIn feed and prompt people to comment on each of the sections. This adds UGC content to the AI generated article.
These articles then generate both acquisition and re-engagement. The articles start to rank in the search engines driving user acquisition and bringing back existing users to the platform.

How’s it going? Well here is the growth graph from Ahrefs on these pages:

How A Typical UGC Loop Works

User generated and company generated SEO loops are not new. A typical UGC loop is simple:

New user joins the platform.
That user creates a piece of content.
The platform then makes that content available to the search engines to get indexed.
Users find the content via the search engines.
They then become a new user of the platform.

This type of loop has been the core of growth engines for products like Pinterest, Quora, and others. An example from Growth Loops Are The New Funnels.

But LinkedIn has taken it to a new level with their AI assisted content loop.

Why The AI Assisted Loop Is Working So Well

In a typical UGC SEO loop, you have a few points of friction. Let’s break them down.

Narrowing The Consumer to Creator Canyon

The biggest constraint in a UGC loop is getting users to cross the canyon into being a creator. Many content platforms only 1% to 2% of users become creators.

But LinkedIn has massively narrowed this canyon. It is much easier to react and comment to something than it is to write an article from scratch. They use AI to do this heavy lifting converting a greater percentage of users into creators.

Getting Users To Create Things That Will Rank

Another constraint in UGC platforms is that not all content users create target keywords that get traffic and/or content that other users aren’t interested in. If thee content doesn’t drive traffic or engagement, then it won’t help the growth model essentially creating “waste.”

But LinkedIn also reduces this problem by using AI to craft the question and starter content of the article to ensure it’s targeting a topic or keyword that will get traffic and a question they know people may be interested in.

Keeping Content Fresh and Unique To Outrank Others

A third constraint of UGC loops is keeping content fresh and unique. The more unique and fresh your content is, the better it typically ranks and the more traffic it gets. Uniqueness is going to be the biggest problem for others who are just pumping out purely AI-generated content.

But by adding the UGC layer on top of the AI article, LinkedIn is adding unique and fresh content. Additionally, over time if an article starts to get outranked, all LinkedIn has to do is promote that article more in the feed to add more unique and fresh content to boost it back up.

🤔 We Have Mixed Feelings About This 🤔

In the video, Fareed and I chat about how we have mixed feelings about it. The content is not great. A lot of it is surface level and feels like consuming empty calories. Most content in the top 10 search results of Google is already like this, but it feels like just more of it at the moment.

We aren’t the only ones. Here are some of the comments in response to my post on LinkedIn.

But we have a lot of respect to the team that created this. They could have easily just pumped out full articles using AI with no human additions to it and it would have likely worked given their domain authority.

But they combined some unique ingredients (LinkedIn's community) with new technology (gen AI) to do something unique and even more powerful.

Going Deeper On UGC SEO Loops

If this type of content loop is part of your growth model, I heavily recommend checking out these Artifacts by Phil Carter on Reforge. He helped growth Quizlet into a top destination and his artifacts around the growth model are priceless.

We also go deep on these loops in the Growth Series and Advanced Growth courses on Reforge.