Legitimate concern, and one I’ve been sitting with personally. I haven’t been posting much on LinkedIn, and this is exactly the kind of thing that makes me question whether that’s a mistake right now.
We obsess over inbox placement and sender reputation, but the AI research layer your prospect hits before opening your message is basically uncontested. If your content isn’t getting cited in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers, you’re arriving cold in two places at once: the inbox and their mental model.
Starting to think individual credibility on LinkedIn isn’t a vanity play anymore. It’s pre-sequence infrastructure. The question I’m wrestling with: is now the right time to build that presence, or is the space already too crowded to cut through?