The LinkedIn "See More" Cutoff: Where It Lands and How to Beat It

Every LinkedIn post is really two texts. There is the whole thing you wrote, up to 3,000 characters of it, and there is the sliver the feed actually shows: two or three lines above a "…more" link. Everyone who scrolls past sees only the sliver. What they do with it decides whether anyone sees the rest.

I build LinkedIn writing tools, so I end up re-measuring this cutoff more often than any other number on this site. It drifts, LinkedIn has never documented it, and people optimize everything else first. Below: where it lands in 2026, how it actually behaves, and how to write for it.

Where the cutoff lands #

LinkedIn does not publish the number, so the honest way to state it is as a measurement. Re-measured against the live feed, the truncation behaves like two budgets applied together, whichever runs out first:

Three notes on reading that table. The tildes are earned: LinkedIn tests layout variations and the numbers drift a little across accounts and app versions, which is why every precise figure you see quoted somewhere is slightly wrong somewhere else. The line budget is the one people forget, and it is why the same 200 characters can survive on one post and get cut on another. And the mobile figure is the one that matters, because that is where the majority of feed scrolling happens.

How the truncation actually works #

The cutoff is a layout behavior, not a character counter. The feed renders your post into a column, clamps it to about three lines of that column, and drops the "…more" link where the clamp lands. That explains all of its quirks:

• Blank lines count as full lines. The clamp counts rendered lines, and an empty line is a rendered line. An opener like "Big news." followed by a blank line has spent two of the three lines on eleven characters.
• Desktop and mobile cut at different points for a boring reason: the columns are different widths. Same post, same clamp, fewer characters fit per line on a phone.
• The cut snaps back to a word boundary, so the visible text often ends a few characters before the budget says it should.
• And some emoji count as two or more characters under the hood, which is why an emoji-heavy opener runs out of room faster than it looks.

Why the cutoff decides reach #

The cutoff would be a cosmetic detail if the feed were a passive display. It is not. LinkedIn has been explicit that it measures dwell time, how long members actually spend with an update, and uses it as a feed-ranking signal, precisely because clicks and likes alone are easy to game and easy to withhold. A post that people stop for, expand and read generates exactly the signals that earn wider distribution. A post that people scroll past generates a fraction of a second of dwell and stops circulating.

Work backwards from that and you land on the visible lines. Nobody decides to stop scrolling because of your credentials or the well-argued middle section they haven't seen yet. The decision gets made on two or three lines, before anything else about the post exists for the reader. This is also where the cutoff meets the impression math covered in what impressions actually count: an impression is banked in 300 milliseconds, and the first lines are what turn that glance into time spent.

What belongs above the fold #

Writing for a 140-character window is mostly deciding what to cut. A few things earn their place over and over:

• Specifics. "We cut onboarding from 14 days to 3" beats "Some thoughts on onboarding efficiency" in any feed on any device.
• Something unresolved. The visible lines have one job, which is making the click necessary. If they wrap the story up on their own, nobody expands the post, and no dwell follows.
• A pattern that keeps working for me: the first line plants a concrete claim, the second complicates it. Both fit inside 140 characters if you make them.
• Keep the hook in plain, searchable words. Bold in an opener can work, but styled characters are invisible to LinkedIn search, so a word or two at most.

Openers that waste the budget #

The same few openers eat the visible lines in almost every underperforming post I get shown. The greeting ("Happy Friday, everyone!"). The throat-clear ("I've been meaning to write about this for a while"). The label ("A thread on hiring:"). And the dramatic one-word line followed by a blank line, which spends two of your three lines on theatre. There's nothing wrong with any of these sentences, there's a lot wrong with spending the only visible lines on them. Move them below the fold or cut them.

AI drafts deserve a special mention: ChatGPT reliably opens with a warm-up sentence, which is precisely the sentence the feed will display. If you draft with AI, rewrite the first two lines by hand, they are the two lines the model is worst at and the feed cares about most. (The formatting side of AI drafts has its own pitfalls, covered in how to paste from ChatGPT to LinkedIn.)

Check before you publish #

You do not need to memorize any number on this page. Paste your draft into the free LinkedIn post preview and it renders the feed card with the "…more" link exactly where it will land, on desktop and mobile, blank-line rules included. The character counter tracks the cutoff alongside every other LinkedIn limit while you type. And if you want the preview while you write rather than after, the Post Formatter extension shows it live inside LinkedIn's composer as part of Pro.

One habit beats all the tactics here. Before publishing, read only the first three lines and ask whether a stranger would click. If the answer is no, the other 2,800 characters are not in the game yet. Fix the sliver first.