Several of you have complained recently about your LinkedIn newsletters not reporting an email open rate and, more concerningly, about a huge drop in the visibility of your newsletters.
LinkedIn have responded to me on the email open rate issue, and I’m afraid it’s not good news.
TL;DR: Email open rates on LinkedIn newsletters are going away altogether from 9 October 2026.
I’ve posted official updates about this verbatim from one of LinkedIn’s case escalation managers: see here and here.
The second point about visibility is pretty major, but I’m not at all confident that we’re getting the full picture from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn say that content visibility is up. This recent interaction I had with someone at LinkedIn didn’t sit right with me, and it doesn’t match at all what hundreds of people have told me recently about their LinkedIn experience.
OK, I don’t have the data that LinkedIn do, and I don’t like to form concrete opinions based on anecdotes alone, but it must say something when literally not one person has told me their visibility has increased in the past year. And I’m not joking when I say that I’ve spoken to hundreds of people about this.
A couple of people with big LinkedIn newsletter followings have told me that they’re very confident that their longform content is not being distributed by LinkedIn as it used to be, and yet their visibility on places like Substack remains good. Again, these are anecdotes but it does make me question how much reliance we can put on LinkedIn for content distribution.
Some stuff you might have missed because of this (alleged!) distribution issue.
I’d guess that even if you follow my posts pretty closely, you won’t have seen everything below. This is a just a handful of the shortform posts I’ve made in the past month:
- Bold in posts
- Date and time on posts
- Recommendations on mobile
- Discontinuation of SSI
- Private connection notes on Premium
So, should we ditch LinkedIn newsletters?
No, because 100% of such longform content published on LinkedIn is indexed by search engines and used by ChatGPT, Claude, etc. when generating answers to queries. And content on the LinkedIn domain is one of the most cited sources by AI.
That means there’s still a great chance for potential customers to discover your work via your LinkedIn newsletter even if they’ve never heard of you or subscribed.
For that reason alone, it’s worth sticking with creating newsletter content here. It’s just that we shouldn’t pretend that the issues I talked about at the top of this piece haven’t severely diluted the value proposition.
A more reliable way of reaching your audience.
Take control of your own content distribution by:
- running a mailing list you control, and
- publishing your content on a website/blog that you own.
I do this via my free Espresso mailing list, with longform content on my relentlessly helpful® blog.
Subscriber numbers on my mailing list are small – the Espresso name is fitting … – but my open rates are good (~45%) and subscribers seem to appreciate my updates, most of which are centred around stuff I say on the Informed podcast.
Side note: I believe that Informed is the world’s longest-running independent podcast about LinkedIn best practice, with 500+ episodes of free advice.
So, in summary…
It does look as though newsletter visibility is down on LinkedIn. That’s not going to stop me creating content here, but it does mean I’m going to push more for people to connect with me via email so that I have a proper chance of actually reaching them.
