Free guide · LinkedIn & Social

20 Reasons Your LinkedIn Post Reads Like AI Slop

Ten things that make a graphic look AI-made and ten that make the caption read AI-written, each with the fix and the number behind it.

Charlie Hills Added 28 August 2026 · Free

What’s inside

1Try this first (about two minutes)
2How it looks (1 to 10)
3How it reads (11 to 20)
4When it still reads wrong

\<callout icon="🧹" color="orange_bg">This is the list. Twenty things that make a LinkedIn post look and read like it came out of a machine. Ten are visual, ten are written. Every one has a fix underneath it, and where I have a number from my own posts, the number is there.

I am not guessing at these. Most came out of my own rejected work.\</callout>

Try this first (about two minutes)

Paste your last post in, with the graphic attached if you made one.

Here is a LinkedIn post I published, and the graphic that went with it.

Audit it against these twenty AI tells. For each one, say PASS or FAIL and quote the exact line or point at the exact element.

HOW IT LOOKS
1. A purple-to-blue gradient nobody chose
2. Lettering that was generated rather than typed
3. A coloured strip down the edge of a card
4. Emoji doing the job of icons
5. The loop arrow
6. Everything centred
7. A grid of identical rectangles
8. A bar or meter with no real number behind it
9. A coloured box highlighted behind a word
10. A motivational line across the bottom

HOW IT READS
11. No bracketed asides anywhere
12. Every paragraph opening on its subject
13. "It's not X, it's Y"
14. Em dashes
15. A noun-phrase fragment as the opening line
16. Opening with "Most people"
17. Any of: leverage, unlock, game-changer, deep dive, tapestry, seamless, landscape, notably, furthermore
18. A rhetorical question
19. Exactly one hyperlink
20. A hook whose second line carries no number and does not end on a colon

Then give me the three worst, ranked, with a rewritten version of each.

That is the whole guide as one prompt. Everything below is why each line is on the list.

That’s the first part. The rest of this guide is free too.

20 Reasons Your LinkedIn Post Reads Like AI Slop

Try this first (about two minutes)

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