What is linkedin reach?

A post's organic reach does not depend only on your follower count. LinkedIn distributes it initially to a fraction of your network and decides whether to widen that based on how the first group behaves: whether they pause to read, whether they interact, and how quickly.

That explains why two posts from the same account can reach very different numbers. It is not that some followers «never see» your posts: it is that the expansion only happens when the early signals are good.

An unintuitive effect is that reach grows more slowly than audience. As your followers increase, the share of them who see each post tends to fall, and with it the engagement rate, without the content having got worse. Which is why tracking your own change over time says more than comparing yourself with accounts of a different size.