Clo Willaerts

Clo Willaerts writes like someone constantly triangulating small signals into a bigger pattern, and that habit is the clearest thread running through her work. She describes noticing "three headlines in one week that seemed totally unrelated until I lined them up" , and this connect-the-dots instinct shows up again in how she frames her newsletter: "Every week, I try to filter the signal from the noise. Not by sharing more links, but by connecting the dots" . She is less interested in reporting news than in what the news implies about how people should think and work. When LinkedIn pulled its AI writing assistant while rolling out AI-detection tools, she read it not as an AI story but as evidence that "sounding like yourself is worth something again" . When LLM reasoning cracks surfaced, her takeaway was that plugging AI into a workflow "doesn't take judgment off your plate. If anything, it puts more on it" . The same instinct drives her observation that the internet is being optimized for AI agents rather than humans, which she says means "many of the assumptions we've built digital products, marketing strategies, and business models on are quietly becoming outdated" .

A second consistent position is her skepticism toward vanity metrics and performative engagement. She argues attention is not the goal, quoting Seth Godin's admission that he doesn't track "downloads. Not reviews. Not what the algorithm wants this week" , and uses that to distinguish people who merely consume content from people who actually buy . This same distrust of noise for its own sake appears in her post about comment-section provocateurs who "pick a fight in your comments... just because your post got traction and their algorithm needs feeding," where she states plainly, "I'll take one real client relationship over a thousand people arguing with me in a comment section" . She is clearly unimpressed by engagement that doesn't convert, closing that post with the line "You can win every fight on this app and still have an empty calendar" .

At the same time, she is pragmatic and tactical about how content actually performs, and she doesn't treat these two positions as contradictory. She gives concrete, almost checklist-style advice: spend more time on your first line than feels reasonable, because "it's usually the most important sentence in the whole post" ; reply to comments quickly in the first hour because "the more engagement your post gets in the first hour, the more likely it is to reach a wider audience" ; and repurpose long-form video since "one video shouldn't be one piece of content. It should be 10. Or 20" . This tactical clarity extends to her thinking on personal branding, where she pushes back on the fear of overgiving: "The more valuable your free content is, the more people trust you," and the real formula is to "Charge for the transformation, not the information" . She reinforces this with founder examples like Fabien Pinckaers, Melanie Perkins, and Brian Chesky, arguing that "People don't just buy products. They buy conviction" .

Her thinking about LinkedIn itself shows real evolution and some ambivalence rather than boosterism. She revisits Scott Galloway's 2020 line that LinkedIn was "the social media platform we're all hoping Facebook and Twitter would become" and openly questions whether that promise held, weighing the platform's relative freedom from "political ragebait" and "conspiracy spirals" against the rise of "engagement bait, fake vulnerability posts, AI generated 'thought leadership'" . She's also alert to structural risks companies create for themselves, warning that an employee who builds a personal brand through company-boosted content becomes a liability the moment they leave, citing Reid Hoffman's line that this is "a rational, necessary response to the end of lifetime employment" .

Finally, there's a personal-discipline strand to her advice that ties back to her broader worldview about attention and judgment. She distinguishes "brainrot mode" from "research mode" on the same phone, arguing the switch has to be built as a habit beforehand rather than summoned on demand, and recommends reducing the platform that "takes the most and gives the least" . Her mid-year reset post applies the same rigor to goals, urging readers to rate each one "On track, At risk, or Dead" and be "brutally honest," because "'At risk' in July becomes 'explaining it away' in December" . Across formats, from tactical LinkedIn tips to structural commentary on AI and platforms, the throughline is consistent: less time spent producing more, more time spent asking sharper questions and building systems, whether personal, algorithmic, or organizational, that hold up under scrutiny .