LinkedIn links: the preview card, the comment, and the reach myth

LinkedIn is where the link-in-the-first-comment argument refuses to die. Somebody screenshots a reach graph, somebody else says the algorithm changed, and nobody involved has run the test on their own audience.

You can settle it for your account in one week with two short links, and the method is the useful part of this page.

Run the test properly

Publish two comparable posts. Same topic, same length, same day of week, same destination.

Post one puts the link in the body: gc.mw/rep1. Post two puts it in the first comment: gc.mw/rep2. Same page at the end of both, different codes, so the click counts never merge.

Now compare clicks per impression rather than clicks. Reach differences are the thing under test; raw click totals will just tell you which post reached more people. If the comment version wins on clicks per impression across four or five pairs, it works for your audience. If it does not, you have stopped paying the preview-card tax for nothing.

We ran this on a small B2B account and the body link won on clicks per impression by a comfortable margin, mostly because the preview card is a second, larger tap target. That is one account, and it is why the answer is a method rather than a number.

What a post can actually hold

A LinkedIn post holds 3,000 characters as of September 2026, and shows roughly two or three lines before "see more". One preview card is generated from the first link in the body.

That card is the asset. It carries the destination's OG title, description and image, and it is clickable across its whole surface. Moving the link to a comment throws it away. Whatever reach story you believe, that trade is real and measurable.

The profile is the part people forget

Your posts have a half-life of about 48 hours. Your profile does not.

The featured section, the website field, the contact info block and the about section all hold links that stay live for years. Every one of them should be a short link, for the same reason every YouTube description should be: the destination moves and the surface does not.

A worked example. A consultant kept three permanent codes in her profile: gc.mw/call for the booking page, gc.mw/rep for the annual report, gc.mw/@anj for the bio page holding everything else. When she moved booking tools, one edit fixed the profile, the email signature, the PDF footer and eleven old posts at the same time.

Over six months, gc.mw/call collected more clicks than any single post's link. Profile traffic is slow, invisible in post analytics, and larger than most people assume, which is precisely why it is worth a code you can count.

What to measure, and what LinkedIn will not tell you

LinkedIn gives you impressions, reactions, comments and a demographic breakdown of who saw the post. It stops at the click.

The short link continues: clicks and unique visitors by day, country, device family, browser and referrer, with linkedin.com and lnkd.in folded into a single LinkedIn row so a post's traffic does not look like two sources. Bots are scored and separated, which matters here because LinkedIn's preview fetcher hits every link the moment you paste it, that first burst is not an audience.

Retention is 30 days on Free, 365 on Pro, 1,095 on Business and Team. B2B sales cycles being what they are, the year-long window is usually the minimum useful one.

Build the tagged link cleanly

Source, medium, campaign, content, filled in once, no typos, and then either shortened or stored as fields on the link so the post stays clean. Ten characters in a post reads as a person sharing something; ninety reads as a campaign, and on LinkedIn that difference costs clicks.

The branded links page covers aliases and per-link OG fields, and if the links are going into proposals and reports as well as posts, custom domain links puts your own name in front of them.