LinkedIn Pulse

What it was

Pulse launched as its own destination inside LinkedIn: a curated feed of long-form posts from influencers and later from any member, sitting apart from the main scrolling feed. For a few years it had its own app, its own editorial picks, and its own sense of being a place readers went to browse articles rather than a feature buried in a profile.

LinkedIn folded that experience into native Articles years ago. Today when you publish a long-form piece, it lives under your profile's Articles section and gets distributed through the regular feed like any other post. There is no separate Pulse app, no separate Pulse algorithm, and no separate Pulse audience to court.

Why the confusion matters to sellers

It matters because outdated advice keeps circulating as if Pulse were still a distinct channel worth a dedicated strategy. Close's B2B sales guide, for example, still tells readers to 'use LinkedIn Pulse to publish content' as a discrete tactic alongside outreach and connection requests, as though it were a separate lever from posting in the feed. It isn't. If you're publishing a long-form article on LinkedIn today, you're using Articles, and it competes for the same feed real estate as a text post, a poll, or a video.

The practical risk is treating long-form articles like a magic bypass around feed algorithm limits, because 'Pulse' sounds like it means something different than 'the feed.' It doesn't. Article distribution follows the same engagement-driven ranking as everything else on LinkedIn.

The misconception, stated plainly

People hear 'Pulse' and assume it still means a curated readership browsing a content hub, the way it worked around 2014. That readership behavior doesn't exist anymore. Nobody opens LinkedIn to browse Pulse. They open LinkedIn to scroll their feed, and an Article shows up there or it doesn't, same as any other post.

How it's actually used now

When someone says they're 'writing a Pulse post,' they mean a native Article. Measure it the same way you'd measure any feed content: impressions, engagement rate, and whether it drives the specific action you wanted, not by some separate Pulse-specific metric, because none exists.