Over 1 million people clicked LinkedIn’s ‘seems like AI slop’ button as the platform fights to keep ‘dead internet theory’ from becoming reality

Years after the “ dead internet theory ” became popular to describe the apparent takeover of online spaces by AI, LinkedIn is taking steps to avoid an early grave by slopification.

Last month, LinkedIn Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan announced in a post on the platform that in an effort to improve the quality of users’ experience, the company would add a new feature, a “seems like AI slop” button, to allow users to flag posts that appear to be AI-generated.

In the first two weeks of the feature’s launch, more than one million people have clicked the “seems like AI slop” button, Hari Srinivasan wrote last week.

He noted that overall members are experiencing 40% fewer views on what the platform classified as AI slop compared to a few weeks prior.

“Despite the progress, we know we have more to do to ensure LinkedIn remains a place where you can find real people & real perspectives,” he said.

“This all remains very top of mind.” While the dead internet theory began in the late 2010s as a fringe belief in tech circles in response to the internet no longer appearing as genuine or lively as it once did in the age of blogs and forums, the conjecture has gone mainstream as agentic AI and bots flood online spaces—and it turns out it’s accurate.

“There’s a lot of missing pieces of information, but a lot of the observed data suggests the same thing, which is there is more bot activity,” Rudy Yang, Pitchbook’s enterprise and retail fintech analyst, told Fortune .

“Agentic AI activity is driving a lot of the browser activity you’re seeing.” Cloud platform Cloudflare noted in April that for the first time , web traffic from AI surpassed that from human users, and as of Tuesday, bots accounted for 61.9% of search requests, compared to 38.1% of requests from humans.

A Pew Research Center study published last week found that of 10,000 webpages collected in July 2026, 10% showed significant signs of AI authorship, compared with about 2% five years ago.

Evidence of AI authorship has been present in more than one-third of all webpages published after ChatGPT was released in late 2022.

By some counts, LinkedIn—where its more than 1.3 billion registered users look for news and facts about employers—struggled more with AI-generated content compared to other text-based social media sites like Medium, X, and Substack.

AI detection startup Pangram found in a July analysis that LinkedIn was “the most AI-saturated platform,” with more than 40% of its longform posts being flagged as completely AI-generated, and its posts accounting for nearly two-thirds of the total content the startup flagged as AI.