Microsoft's latest quarterly update reported that LinkedIn revenue grew 12% — up 10% in constant currency — "primarily driven by growth in Marketing Solutions," the company's advertising business.
Before the Microsoft acquisition, LinkedIn published total users, engagement and monthly actives. Now it surfaces as a line or two inside a much larger report. LinkedIn CEO Daniel Shapero filled in some detail in his own post shortly after:
Shapero also noted that more B2B brands are partnering with creators to boost their LinkedIn promotions — the behavior LinkedIn is trying to formalize through its Creator Marketplace and BrandLink initiatives.
The comment metric deserves a second look. Last week LinkedIn began testing an option to report comments that "seem like AI slop" in-stream, both to suppress bot and AI-generated replies and to feed detection signals back into its models.
The timing matters. An 18% rise in comment engagement announced alongside a crackdown on AI comments means nobody has separated human interaction from automated interaction yet. That split should become visible once the countermeasures take effect.
First, ad-led growth means more competition for inventory and upward pressure on costs. Second, the platform is actively promoting creator partnerships, which favors pairing company pages with individual accounts rather than running the brand page alone. Third, suppressing AI slop shortens the useful life of bulk automated commenting.
For the parallel dynamic on another platform, see Building a Brand on X in 2026: Posting Links Alone Costs You Reach.
Microsoft attributed it primarily to Marketing Solutions, its advertising business. Revenue grew 12%, or 10% in constant currency.
Not in detail. This quarter the CEO separately shared double-digit member growth, content consumption up 10%, and comment time up 18%.
A test started last week letting members flag comments that appear AI-generated in-stream, which also supplies signals to improve bot and AI detection.
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More than a million people used LinkedIn's AI slop reporting option in its first two weeks, and views on slop-classified content fell 40%. But reporting is feed control, not enforcement.