This AI Overview is reporting a false metric because LinkedIn’s DAU is not public information (otherwise we’ll see a troubling stat + lots of automated bots and accounts).
Heading to the Social Shepherd article, it claims to be a 2025 study, but it quotes Statista.
The link to Statista is a 2021 research claiming the following:
“As of March 2021, 17.1 percent of Android LinkedIn app owners in the United States accessed the job searching app on a daily basis.”
(The chart is showing 16.2% instead of 17.1%, which is what the AI allegedly used to source and divide by the total reported users 4 years later).
Funny enough, the Statista piece is authored by Stacy Jo Dixon, and one of the topics she explores is “online disinformation”. Hallucinations become more of a problem nowadays as soon as data isn’t present in the top 1 layer.
The excessive fake accounts/bots + virality are the core reason I spend 90% less time on social over the past year.
And my focus on first-party data – newsletter + professional Slack groups – is further backed by all the fake news that even Google consistently provides today.
