Hi Team PR@ctical.
This going to be my headline for a few days, because it probably impacts everyone reading this. If you use AI to support your Linkedin content creation, this one is for you.
On July 30, LinkedIn added a “Seems like AI slop” option to every post in the feed. Anyone (think: competitors, customers, co-workers) can now flag your client’s content.
That means flagged posts can get reduced distribution outside your own network, and LinkedIn will privately warn accounts whose content reads as inauthentic.
Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan said: “AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this.” In the same breath, LinkedIn deleted its own “enhance your post” AI writing feature and replaced it with a proofreader that fixes grammar without touching your voice.
This shouldn’t be shocking and honestly I thought it would be higher: Pangram scanned 1,002,627 posts across five platforms and found that more than 40% of long-form LinkedIn posts are fully AI-generated. LinkedIn produced 62% of all the AI content they flagged while making up only about a third of what they scanned. It is the most AI-saturated platform they measured. Reddit, for contrast, came in at 4.4%. (Pangram sells an AI detector, so a detection company reporting that AI is everywhere deserves the obvious asterisk. The sample is also self-selected, pulled from posts their extension users chose to scan.)
So roughly two in five long-form posts on the platform would plausibly cause someone to hit that button.
Now, onto the thing that I am going crazy about.
A study of 175 brands across eight AI engines found that 96% of brands get described accurately when you ask about them by name (branded prompts), and 89% don’t who up when you ask a category question (non-branded prompts). When buyers asked the research question instead of the brand question, 99.99% of 49,391 citations pointed to third-party websites. Not the brand’s own pages. Somebody else’s.
We already knew this due to the millions of prompts we are now monitoring.
More on how to run it in THE MOVE at the bottom.
Your two Certification Day winners: Ujala Qazi and Michelle Monson. Both wrote a 27th Touch post that made me stop scrolling, which was the entire point of the exercise.
PS: AI Visibility Certification Day cohort #2 is August 27, 12:00 to 1:30 PT, 20 seats. Two just went to the giveaway. Grab one of the rest here.
🚀 BUILDING & LAUNCHING
AI Visibility Certification Day, cohort #2 (August 27)
Ninety minutes, live, 20 seats, and you leave with the actual testing method: prompt anatomy, the concierge audit, and the category question test. Cohort #1 sold out and the recording is not a substitute, because half the value is watching your own brand fail a prompt in real time. Two seats are gone to the giveaway winners. Reserve a seat.
The Pitch Desk
Since we are talking about AI slop this week, this is the tool built for the other end of the pipe. The Pitch Desk grades your pitch before it reaches a journalist. You compose, it diagnoses, you workshop, then you send. It runs the SNAP test on every pitch: Surprising, New, Actionable, Pertinent. You feed it the target reader, company size, vertical, geography, and buyer title, and it hands back specific fixes plus outlet suggestions. It also keeps a repository of what you sent and what actually got coverage, so the recommendations sharpen against your real results instead of a generic model of “good pitch.”
AI Slop Reduction Addendum for LLMs
Re-featuring this one because LinkedIn just made it a news story. It is the instruction set you paste into your model so your drafts stop arriving with the tells: the stacked adverbs, the tricolons, the em-dash habit, the “it’s not X, it’s Y” construction that every classifier on earth has learned to spot. Get it on Stan.
⚡ THE BRIEF
1. LinkedIn shipped an AI slop report button, then killed its own AI writing tool
What happened: On July 30, LinkedIn added “Seems like AI slop” to the post options menu across the feed. Flags feed LinkedIn’s classifiers, and flagged content can lose distribution beyond your immediate network. Accounts with a pattern get a private warning on their dashboard rather than a public penalty. The next day, LinkedIn confirmed it removed the “enhance your post” AI writing feature entirely, replacing it with a proofreader that preserves voice. The platform says it blocks hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts every day and has stopped billions of automation attempts in the last few months.
What to do: Pull the AI-polish step out of your LinkedIn workflow this week. The final-pass rewrite step, which is the one that flattens voice into something a classifier and a human both recognize. Then kill any templated comment program you are running, because engagement pods are the single most detectable pattern on the platform.
Why it matters: Executive ghostwriting is the highest-trust, highest-risk product most comms teams sell. A CEO post that gets crowd-flagged is not a reach problem you fix next quarter. It is a credibility problem you have to explain in a meeting.
🔗 TechCrunch · Fortune · Pangram data
2. 89% of brands never get named when a buyer asks AI about their category
What happened: A study published July 29 tested 175 brands across legal, healthcare, SaaS, financial services, and retail on eight platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Meta AI. When asked directly by name, 96% of brands were described accurately. When asked a category research question, 89% never appeared. Of 49,391 citations generated by those category prompts, 99.99% pointed to third-party sites. Only 0.10% of problem-awareness answers named any brand at all. Brands with fewer than 2,000 indexed pages mentioning them across the web had a 3% mention rate.
What to do: Stop reporting on branded prompts. That is the 96% test, and it measures whether the model has a file on you. Build your prompt set out of the questions a buyer asks before they know you exist, then track how often a competitor gets named instead.
Why it matters: This is the earned media budget argument in one number. Owned content cannot buy you into a consideration set that is assembled from third-party pages. Coverage is the input.
3. Two AI disclosure regimes went live on Sunday, and one of them has a carve-out you should use
What happened: August 2 was a double deadline. The EU AI Act’s Article 50 transparency obligations took effect alongside actual fining power for the AI Office and national authorities: up to €15 million or 3% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher. Article 50 requires chatbots to disclose they are AI on first interaction, requires deepfakes and AI-manipulated media to be labeled, and requires AI-generated text on matters of public interest to be disclosed. The same day, California’s AI Transparency Act became operative. Providers with over 1,000,000 monthly users must offer a free public AI-detection tool and embed provenance data in outputs. Penalty is $5,000 per violation, with each day counting separately.
What to do: Read the Article 50 carve-out, because it is written for you. AI-generated text on matters of public interest does not require disclosure when a named human takes editorial responsibility for it. That is a documentable process, not a legal opinion. Put a named reviewer on record for every AI-assisted release, byline, and AI Notice touching EU audiences, and keep the record. Second: tell your design and web teams to stop stripping metadata out of image files.
Why it matters: Comms is about to get handed the disclosure clipboard.
🔗 EU AI Act Article 50 guidance · California AB 853 text
🏠 HOUSE OF ZEN
Ninety-six percent of brands get described accurately when someone types their name. Eighty-nine percent vanish when someone types the category question. That gap is the entire business problem, and you cannot fix a gap you have not measured.
The AI Accelerator at Zen Media is the seven-day version of the fix. We run the prompts your buyers actually type, not the ones with your name in them. You get the baseline, the competitor set that shows up instead of you, and the content built to close the specific gap we find. Guaranteed increase in AI visibility in seven days.
If you have been asked “are we showing up in AI?” and did not have a defensible answer, this is that answer. Start here.
📊 This week’s RECEIPTS, REPORT DROP, PLATFORM MOVES, the Monthly Trend Memo, and THE HUMAN BYLINE PROTOCOL are below the fold for paid subscribers. →
