Why executive profiling is mandatory for B2B tech brands
Note: what was supposed to be a short blog has turned into a guide. It happens.
Executive Summary: Why Does Executive Profiling Matter?
For B2B tech brands, executive profiling is no longer optional. With 94% of enterprise purchasers now using Large Language Models (LLMs) to evaluate vendors , traditional search is being replaced by Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). AI models prioritise verifiable human expertise over faceless corporate pages. To remain algorithmically visible, brands must turn executives into structured, machine-readable entities by optimizing profiles with active verbs, publishing long-form newsletters, and maintaining strict topical consistency.
With the F1 season about to kick into gear, let me open this story with an analogy. Most B2B tech brands are currently building the digital equivalent of a multi-million-pound F1 car, only to realise they’ve forgotten the wheels.
How does this apply to exec visibility? Well, let me explain.
The F1 car is your brand. The tech. The proprietary backend infrastructure. But the wheels? That’s your people. And without them, you aren’t going anywhere fast in the era of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
The Commercial Reality
Chief Marketing Officers do not have the time to wade through fluff to find the commercial impact. Let us cut straight to the empirical truth.
- The Threat: 94% of enterprise purchasers now use Large Language Models to evaluate vendors and build shortlists. Traditional search is dead. AI synthesis has taken over.
- The Vulnerability: Generative AI algorithms actively ignore your sanitised corporate page. They do not trust faceless marketing collateral. They trust verifiable human expertise.
- The Fix: You must turn your executives into highly structured, machine-readable entities. If your leadership team is silent, your brand is algorithmically invisible.
I get it. You’ve heard this all before. And quite frankly, you are bored of hearing the exact same excuses from your execs and subject matter experts:
- I don’t have the time
- It won’t have any impact
- I’m not an influencer
- I’ve got nothing to say
- It’s just a place to show our culture and employer branding
And these are excuses. For anyone (well maybe not Ryan Reynolds), putting your head above the parapet is terrifying. I’ve got on stage to give a talk visibly sweating, wondering if anyone is listening. My finger has hovered over the send button on a LinkedIn post or an email for a hot minute as I think whether what I’m saying makes any sense.
But there is an even bigger risk than saying the wrong thing. Saying nothing at all.
Why? Because 94% of enterprise purchasers now use Large Language Models to in their buying processes. GEO / AEO / AI Search / LLM wonderland has changed the game. And now your people are one of the most important assets in your marketing machine.
Why people matter
It wasn’t long ago (late 2025) that LinkedIn executed a complete algorithmic rebuild. They pivoted from a social graph based on who you know, to an Interest Graph based on what you know. Replacing its traditional, fragmented, feature-engineered models with a unified retrieval and ranking system powered by LLMs.
Enter 360Brew, LinkedIn's new 150-billion-parameter foundation model (don’t ask me about the naming convention).
This change shifts the platform from relying on engagement metrics to a deep semantic understanding of content, user behaviour and professional topical authority.
It’s looking for the expert who can anchor a brand’s credibility with actual, real-world friction and data.
The algorithm wants experts who share brave opinions that challenge the status quo. And, it is feeding the LLMs the very data those models need to recommend your company.
People can no longer hide behind the company profile. That’s not where your best content should live. While it's safe and controllable, it’s not impactful in the zero-click world.
Today, when a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a recommendation, AI is not just scraping your content, analyst reports, and journalistic articles. It is looking for verifiable human expertise. It’s why Reddit and LinkedIn make up such a large portion of source data and citations.
So, if your execs aren’t active, they don’t exist. And, if they don’t exist, the chances of your brand showing up in LLMs are significantly diminished.
The next time an exec asks you how we are going to show up in LLMs, you can say: by using YOU.
A 3-Step Exec Visibility Practical Blueprint
Ok - I hear you. The first thing an exec is going to reply is: Can you do this for me? I haven't got the time. And we know they are incredibly busy closing sales and running the org. So let me help you help them. Here’s my three-step approach to optimising your experts for algorithmic availability.
Step 1: Kill the Vanilla Bio
We have all seen the Top Voices on LinkedIn. They all have headlines claiming they are a brand whisperer, sales Jedi, strategic visionary, or author and speaker (my absolute favorite bullsh!t title). While it may all sound a bit like puffery, the intent is right.
Your bio, from your headline to your experience, all matters. It’s all indexed and sending signals back to the machines. We need to beef it up, so it counts.
Vague headlines, such as ‘helping businesses grow,’ will remain algorithmically (and humanly) useless. It must function as a dense data string that explicitly answers three questions:
- The person’s real role
- The target audience they are appealing to
- The measurable proof of capability
Then we move on to the About section, typically reserved for boring, chronological biographical summaries that no one really cares about. This section is now your LLM Wiki: a structured, highly dense repository of facts, methodologies and philosophies that an AI agent can easily extract, link, and cite.
And, at this point, it’s important to remember that it’s not all about them. It’s all about the brand. Whatever you write here must mirror your brand messaging house, forcing the LLM to associate the profile with your key messages.
Their philosophies must map the profile to key search queries you want to be known for and proof and data points should be referenced to back up their thinking. The format matters too. You must mimic Markdown structure (using clear headings and bullet points) in a plain text format to make it easy for AI engines to parse and chunk the information.
Don’t write war and peace here. You still need to be punchy and engaging to the human. But be choiceful around your inclusions and omit anything that isn’t aligned to company messaging - they are the ambassador of the brand after all.
Finally, experience and skills. When an LLM evaluates professional experience, it heavily prioritses concrete actions and measurable outcomes over passive task descriptions. Vague phrases like ‘responsible for’ or ‘managed’ are are penalised in favour of strong, decisive action verbs, like architected, deployed, scaled, and generated.
We all know LLMs love a superlative.
Again, it should be optimised against what you want that exec to be famous for (which we will come onto in step 2).
And, let’s not forget skills. These form the foundational layer of the platform’s semantic skill graph. So make sure you have selected the ones that hone in on the specilisms you want to promote and have the exec known for.
Step 2: Feeding the Algorithm
Updating and optimising your profile is only the first course for LLMs. It signals the quality of the feast that’s about to be put on your plate. And that is your content - the main course - the high quality inputs that validate authority, establish entity relationships and maintain citation recency.
Your execs' narrative on LinkedIn matters and will make them become the preeminent voice in whatever industry matters to you.
But the main course mustn’t be a concoction of ingredients thrown on a plate at random. Publishing random musings, generic corporate announcements, or reactive commentary dilutes algorithmic authority and fails to build a cohesive human brand.
It must be an eloquently engineered dish with the sole aim of making you famous for something. The chicken. The sea bass. The way you put salt on a steak. Okay, I will stop the analogy there. I have gone too far.
At Babel, we love a framework. And one of the ones we love most is our Unique Messaging Platform (our take on a messaging house). Why, because it drives consistency. Forces us to be choiceful. And enables us to say no. While we do this for brand positioning and messaging, it is equally important to do this for your executives.
So build one for each exec, aligning it with your overall brand messaging, as a successful executive profiling strategy requires absolute editorial discipline.
Key things to consider:
- The platform: this is the overarching message. The thing you want them to be famous for. Their umbrella opinion or perspective on the industry.
- Orbital Pillars: Break down the overarching message into three (max four) highly relevant narrative pillars. Map these pillars to recent public statements, core commercial offerings and the broader trajectory of the industry.
- Emotional Benefits: What do you want the audience to feel. This still matters and acts as the guardrails for your tone of voice and enables you to build memory structures with emotional resonance.
- Customer Benefits: Let’s be honest, we’re doing all of this to drive revenue at the end of the day. Mapping the customer benefits of your products that align to these pillars gives you an authentic way to link it all together.
Showing up consistently is one of the strongest signals that LLMs look for. Not only that, its what LinkedIn looks for when selecting Top Voices. Make sure you have a narrative framework and messaging matrix that enables you to achieve that. More importantly, use it across the different channels - from PR to blog content to ensure you are creating the critical validation signals LLMs crave.
Step 3: The Content Mix
You have an optimised profile, you know what you’re going to say. Now you need to say it. And how you tell your story has a meaningful impact on discovery. Different formats serve vastly different algorithmic and psychological purposes. To dominate both the human news feed and underlying LLM indexing processes, you need a multi-layered content mix.
These are the four must-dos for any senior exec.
The Long Form Anchor: Newsletters and Articles
Short-form posts are completely useless when it comes to capturing GEO value. The 360Brew algorithm requires you to optimise for the Depth Score. LLMs require rich, structured, context-heavy text to extract meaningful insight. So if you are going down the path of using execs and SMEs to aid discoverability, the absolute cornerstone of your content strategy must be long-form content. This can take the guise of LinkedIn articles or newsletters.
Why? Because these formats allow for the use of proper HTML tags (H1, H2, H3 headings), bulleted lists, integrated statistics and highly structured arguments. You can deliberately create them to be citation-friendly, creating factual, definitive, opinionated, and highly structured content that can be extracted and cited. And you can hyperlink the sh!t out of them, providing a vital, algorithmically approved bridge back to brand content, whitepapers, case studies, and landing pages, driving high-intent organic traffic.
Not only that, from a human perspective, newsletters provide a triple notification advantage. Unlike standard posts that rely on algorithmic feed placement, newsletters trigger alerts via email, push notifications and the in-app feed, ensuring incredibly high visibility among opted-in audiences.
Again, the key to a successful newsletter or article is deep insights, practical strategies and challenging perspectives. Or as I like to say, what can my reader read today and implement tomorrow.
The Engagement Engine
While newsletters satisfy the deep-reading LLMs and senior industry analysts, you still need content in the feed that engages people and drives brand awareness. After all, if we’re going for algorithmic availability, we may as well use the opportunity to also create mental availability.
And the best way to do that is through highly visual, thumb-stopping content. In fact, posts containing visual elements receive significantly higher positive reactions and engagement than text alone.
What does this mean? It means creating video and PDF carousels.
Video content on LinkedIn experienced massive, unprecedented growth. Overall, video posts climbed by 53%, and specifically, CEO video usage has increased by 68%. The platform actively promotes its TikTok-style vertical video feed, creating an immediate, intimate connection with the viewer.
These don’t need to be long - think 60 to 90 second hot takes. They could be rapid recaps, takeaways from the newsletter content or quick reactions to breaking news. One or two per month can build a high-trust, visually engaging library of leadership perspectives that plain text alone cannot possibly replicate.
On the other hand, PDF carousels (or document posts) generate some of the highest average engagement rates on the platform. Do not use them at your peril.
And you don’t need to boil the ocean here either. You can repurpose podcast appearances, keynotes speeches, or the newsletter, turning them into easily digestible, highly visual slide decks. Two per month should be more than enough to get started with.
Commentary
Broadcasting alone won’t get you a Top Voice status, or foster a community and provoke industry chatter. For this, you need to visibly participate in the comments section. Whether that’s validating other experts’ perspectives, engaging in constructive conversations, or lambasting some snake oil salesman (rage sells apparently - but that’s a topic for another blog).
The active engagement will prove the authenticity of the executive presence and signal to the algorithm that the profile is highly active, boosting the reach of future publications.
But remember - only comment on things that align with your Unique Messaging Platform and Pillars. Going rogue and random will not help in any way.
Well…there you have it. The business case for and the way to implement an executive visibility strategy on LinkedIn. Do it for discoverability and deploy it with structure.
The B2B Sea of Sameness is a choice. You can choose to keep polishing your wheel-less F1 car. Or you can take the brave step of putting your experts out there.
At Babel, we don’t just do PR. We architect the convergence of reputation and revenue. We help you build a unique messaging platform that turns your leadership into an algorithmic unfair advantage.
Ready to stop being invisible to the engines that matter? Let’s talk about a getting brave with exec visibility. Because at the end of the day, you don’t pay your mortgage with "ghost" profiles. You pay it with revenue.
Right?
