Understanding LinkedIn’s Commercial Search Limitations

Posted by Jonathan Kidder on January 21, 2018January 28, 2023

I recently had a great discussion about getting into “LinkedIn Jail” on our Talent Sourcers group on Facebook. Kasia Borowicz wrote a recent piece about how she was blocked out of LinkedIn due to viewing too many profiles. She claimed that she was not over viewing profiles on a daily basis. So, I wanted to fully understand what are the commercial search limitations are on LinkedIn. I wanted to answer this question:

What are LinkedIn’s search limitations on an account profile?

A few years back LinkedIn introduced commercial use limit on search on the amount of views you can look at user profiles. Basically, LinkedIn wanted users to pay for premium subscriptions like Business, Recruiter, and Sales Navigator. It comes down to making a profit which is understandable. I tried reaching out to my LinkedIn directly and here’s what my sales rep said – the limit number is proprietary and secret. So, I decided to do some researching on my own.

Here’s some fun conspiracy theories that I found on Quora:

Profile views are 50 public views and 50 standard views per day.
I have found that if you open 300 profiles a day, manually that’s the limit.
500 views per day is the maximum limit.

One user on a different forum really stood out for me and here’s what she concluded:

“The limit various from one user to the next ans is calculated using your previous monthly search activity. Even though the number itself is unclear, you should be able to gauge it by the progress bar that will appear in your search results when you have reached 30% and you will see progression towards your limit 5% at at a time. Once you have reached your limit, you may still be able to conduct searches.” — Anonymous user

Is the sky falling?

From my guess is that this user probably knows someone at LinkedIn. So, this tells us that LinkedIn is tracking our day to day profiles views. Is this a time to panic I would say no – they’ve limited these search limitations since 2015. So, If you are not paying for services on LinkedIn I recommend using resources outside of LinkedIn. Also, sometimes you can get locked out even if you have a paid account but it’s not as likely. That’s probably due to another issue: using browser extensions. Yes, some sources (Michael Kelemen) are claiming that LinkedIn has changed in recent months however, that is still unconfirmed at this time.

How to avoid getting into LinkedIn Jail

It’s pretty easy to get locked out of an account with a free profile when searching directly on LinkedIn. So, the trick will be to search outside of LinkedIn using other resources. Good to mention that LinkedIn does not track external searches.

So, here’s some tools and websites to use to avoid getting into LinkedIn jail:

Using different extensions that search outside of LinkedIn: Hiretual and Seekout (Paid).
Using Hiringsolved database (Paid).
Using a Custom Search Engine – Irina Shamaeva.
Using Social Talent (SourceHub).
“Good old fashion” Xraying of LinkedIn profiles (check out Recruitin).
I recommend this tool (Nefarious LinkedIn) which allows you to see which extensions LinkedIn scans for.

Unfortunately, for now LinkedIn will not reveal how many views a profile users can view per day. I’m guessing it’s based on your overall search history and I’m sure it’s being calculated out on a monthly basis. For while, I was getting locked out of LinkedIn on a weekly basis and once I upgraded to recruiter lite it hasn’t been a problem at all. Again, try using the above suggestions and hopefully that will resolve all your LinkedIn jail woes.

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Jonathan Kidder

With more than 12 years of recruitment experience, Jonathan has helped startups and small businesses find the talent they need. He runs the blog WizardSourcer, which explores the latest trends in talent sourcing, provides reviews of recruitment tools, and features interviews with prominent figures in the industry.