LinkedIn API: The Developer Guide (Official, Third-Party & MCP)

Start with what the term means, because two different things answer to it. A LinkedIn API is any programmatic way to read LinkedIn data or act on an account without a person clicking through the interface. That covers LinkedIn’s own official API and a third-party API, a managed provider acting on an account you connect. The gap between them decides what you can build.

The direct answer, before the detail: the official API does not allow outreach automation. The endpoints for it are documented, POST /v2/invitations for a connection request and POST /v2/messages for a member-to-member message, and both sit in a program LinkedIn has closed to new access. The partners already inside are barred from automated sending by the terms attached to it, and profile and search access is restricted to approved partners. To search, connect, message and enrich programmatically, developers use a third-party LinkedIn API. The rest of this page covers which kinds exist, what each one costs, and what each does to the risk of losing the account you connect. That risk is the number worth asking every provider for. On the gtm-api.com stack, 20,000+ accounts run with under 1% of them ever restricted.

This guide maps what developers actually need to know: which official APIs exist (and which need partner approval), where their documentation and rate limits live, what only a third-party API can do, what it costs, and how to call it from code or from an AI agent. Facts on the official side are drawn from LinkedIn’s own developer documentation.

Does LinkedIn have an official API?

Yes, but a restricted one. LinkedIn offers official APIs for sign-in, sharing, advertising, Sales Navigator, talent and learning. Two are self-serve. The valuable ones require partner-program approval. Critically, none of the programs you can actually join send connection requests, send member-to-member messages, or search arbitrary member profiles, the exact actions outreach needs.

Self-serve (open to any developer)

In the LinkedIn Developer Portal you can use these without approval: Sign In with LinkedIn (OpenID Connect, the member’s name, profile photo and email) and Share on LinkedIn (w_member_social, post, comment and like as the authenticated member on their own feed). Useful for auth and publishing. Nothing to do with reaching other people.

Partner-only (approval required)

The rest are gated behind an application and review: the Marketing Developer Platform (ads and audiences), the Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) (analytics, display, and matched profile data, not open search), Talent solutions (Recruiter System Connect, Apply Connect, job posting), and Learning. Compliance APIs are closed to new requests entirely, and that is the tree the Invitations and Messages endpoints sit in. Approval can take weeks and is limited to qualifying companies.

Here’s the full official lineup, grouped by how you get access. “Self-serve” means you can switch it on in the Developer Portal today. “Partner approval” means an application and a review.

Access works the same way for all of them, and the sequence has a few steps that are easy to miss: How to get official LinkedIn API access maps the Page requirement, the product requests, the Development and Standard tiers, and the programs that are closed.

Notice what the list does not get you. A Messages API, an Invitations API and a Connections API all exist in LinkedIn’s documentation. All three sit under Compliance, whose access page lists its permissions for reference only and states that access may not be requested, and no open or partner scope grants them. Even SNAP, the closest thing to a data API, returns matched profiles to approved sales partners, and it has stopped taking new ones: its three service families and what they never did are on Sales Navigator API.

One official route does put a message in a member’s inbox, and a full comparison has to include it. Message Ads and Conversation Ads, part of the Advertising API, build their content through POST /rest/inMailContents and land in LinkedIn Messaging. LinkedIn’s own wording is “A Message Ad is a message delivered to a LinkedIn member’s InMail inbox.” What the schema has no field for is a recipient. You set a sender, a subject and a body, and delivery goes to a campaign audience. The person is never named. The only per-person send in that API is the test send, and its recipient is the authenticated member, which is you. What does send a message or an invitation today, and on what terms, is on LinkedIn messaging API.

Where the documentation lives

On learn.microsoft.com, split into six docsets: Consumer, Compliance, Learning, Marketing, Sales and Talent. Each business line versions its APIs on its own schedule. Versioned APIs live under api.linkedin.com/rest and pick a version with a LinkedIn-Version header, the unversioned ones stayed on /v2, and several shared pages still describe the older model. The Developer Portal, where you create the app and read your quota, is a separate site on linkedin.com. The map of all six docsets, with the support window each version gets, is on LinkedIn API documentation.

How LinkedIn rate-limits its API

On two levels, per application and per member, both counted over a 24-hour day that resets at midnight UTC. LinkedIn publishes no general figure and concrete numbers for only three products: Community Management on the Development tier at 500 calls per app and 100 per member a day, Verified on LinkedIn at 5,000 calls a day on its Development and Lite tiers, and the Advertising API, whose Development tier is stated in ad-account entitlements. Your own numbers sit on the Analytics tab of the app in the Developer Portal, and only for endpoints it has already called that day.

A third-party API runs into a different wall: the ceiling LinkedIn holds each member account to, whatever software drives it. The app quota is taken apart on LinkedIn API rate limits, and the per-account ceilings on LinkedIn connection limits.

The capability map: official vs third-party

The split is consistent once you go action by action: anything about your own presence has an official route, and anything that reaches another member does not. In the table below, “official” means LinkedIn’s own developer program, and “third-party API” means a managed provider like GTM API acting on an account you own.

† Posting to a company or organization Page, rather than your own member feed, needs the organization scope (w_organization_social) and admin rights on that Page.

In short: the official API is built for your own presence and ads. A third-party API is built for reaching and researching other people. Almost every “LinkedIn automation” or “AI SDR” product is built on the second because the first simply doesn’t expose those actions.

Why LinkedIn restricts its API

LinkedIn keeps outreach and search out of reach on the official API deliberately, and the closed Compliance tree is the proof. The endpoints were built and documented, then put behind a door that no longer opens. Open programmatic messaging and bulk profile access would flood members and erode trust, and member data is the platform’s core asset. This is a product decision backed by the Terms of Service, so building a roadmap around some future official outreach API is wishful thinking.

The stance has been tested in court, though only narrowly. The long-running hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn case concerned scraping logged-out public profiles under the CFAA, and even there LinkedIn ultimately prevailed on breach of contract, with hiQ paying $500K, deleting its data and shutting down. Authenticated, account-based automation is a separate Terms-of-Service question that hiQ leaves open. It’s useful background, and it’s a long way from legal cover. The three legal questions, and how hiQ actually ended, are taken apart on Is scraping LinkedIn legal?.

Which reframes the decision. The official API will not hand an outreach product what it needs, so the practical question is how to do it with the least risk.

What a third-party LinkedIn API can do

A third-party LinkedIn API turns the actions a person does by hand, search, connect, message, engage, enrich, into typed endpoints an app or AI agent can call. What any given provider can actually do depends on where it sits in the market, and the category splits four ways:

• The official API. Sign-in and publishing, plus the partner-gated ads, sales and talent programs above. No outreach, no open search.
• Scrapers (Bright Data, Apify). Fetch public pages at volume. No authenticated actions, and the page is all you get.
• Dataset providers (People Data Labs, Coresignal). Sell a pre-built database of profiles. Broad coverage, but the records are as fresh as the last crawl.
• Account-based APIs (gtm-api.com, Unipile, Linked API, OutX, LinkdAPI). Act on a LinkedIn account you connect, so they return live data and perform actions. This is the only bucket that can send an invite or a message. What an automation API does on the account behind it, and who holds its limits, is on LinkedIn automation API. Finished automation tools sit on top of these same buckets, and the LinkedIn automation hub explains how each kind runs.

In that last bucket sits GTM API. It groups 190+ tools into typed LinkedIn toolsets (representative below), all behind one key and one schema, so the same contract powers a REST integration and an agent in any MCP client. If you are choosing between the vendors in that bucket, there is a separate ranking of the best LinkedIn API options, with every safety figure those vendors publish quoted and sourced.

LinkedIn is the live channel today. Email (Gmail, Outlook, IMAP), messengers (WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram DMs) and calendars (Google, Microsoft) are on the roadmap on the same typed contract. Details on the agent interface are on the LinkedIn MCP server page.

Searching LinkedIn through an API

LinkedIn’s own API does not search LinkedIn. It publishes two search APIs and neither one queries the member graph. People Typeahead matches names among your own Page’s followers, ten at a time, so you can @mention someone in a Page post. Unified Search is a widget for applicant tracking systems on a Recruiter System Connect contract, rendered in a LinkedIn iframe for a person to read. People, company and Sales Navigator searches that hand back rows exist only on the account-based route, and what comes back depends on which of those searches ran, since each has its own filters and its own page cap. Both official APIs and the account-based filters are on LinkedIn search API.

Looking up a profile

No official endpoint returns another member’s profile. LinkedIn’s profile endpoints read the authenticated member and nobody else, and its platform terms cap storage of most member profile data at 24 hours. An arbitrary profile comes from one of three third-party routes: a pre-built dataset, a scraper, or an account-based API reading as an account you connect. How long the provider is likely to last belongs in that choice now. LinkedIn sued Proxycurl, then one of the most-used profile APIs, in January 2025, the company shut down that July, and every product built on it went dark with it. The three routes are compared on LinkedIn profile data API.

Publishing and reading posts

Publishing is the most open thing on the platform. A member post runs on w_member_social, which arrives with the self-serve Share on LinkedIn product and needs no approval. Posting as an organization needs w_organization_social, a Community Management review and a Page admin role. Reading a member’s posts back runs on r_member_social, which LinkedIn’s own documentation calls a closed permission, and nothing at any tier reads somebody else’s posts. The permissions and the scope rename that trips up comment calls are on LinkedIn posts API.

Is there a jobs API?

One, and it only writes. The Job Posting API lets an approved Talent Solutions partner post, update and close jobs for a customer, and LinkedIn has stopped accepting new partnerships for it. No official endpoint reads or searches job listings at any tier. Three different needs share the name: publishing vacancies, collecting listings as data, and finding companies that are hiring. Only the first is LinkedIn’s own product, and the routes for the other two are on LinkedIn jobs API.

What a LinkedIn API costs

LinkedIn publishes no price for its own API. You pay in approval time instead, and what it opens without approval covers sign-in and posting only. Third-party LinkedIn APIs charge one of two ways: per connected account, a flat monthly fee with unlimited actions, or per call, metered credits per request. At the leading vendors that comes to between $0 and $99 per connected account a month, or from about a third of a cent to ten cents a call for data about other people.

GTM API uses the per-account model, from $10 per account per month at volume, with unlimited outreach and action calls, and a free plan for one account with no card. An agent that sends thousands of messages costs the same as one that sends ten.

Per account wins for steady sending and per call for occasional lookups, and an agent that reads, searches and acts on an account all day crosses that line within days. Twenty-seven vendors, the nine units they charge in and the breakeven between the two models are on LinkedIn API pricing. GTM API’s own brackets and the 5G Proxy add-on are on the pricing page.

How to get started

Getting programmatic LinkedIn access takes minutes, with no partner review to wait on: create a key, connect an account, and make your first call over REST or MCP. Both interfaces hit the same typed contract, so moving between them later changes nothing about the calls you’ve already written. There’s a forever free plan, Sandbox, with no card and no time limit.

1. Create an API key. Sign up and generate it in the dashboard. The free plan takes no card.
2. Connect a LinkedIn account you own. It gets its own isolated browser session and its own residential proxy, and a new account warms up before it scales.
3. Make a call. Hit the REST endpoint directly, or point Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any other MCP client at the MCP server and let the agent call the same tools.
4. Watch account health. Snapshots, quota-hit logs and block logs are endpoints too, so an agent can read its own headroom and back off before a restriction tells it to.

Make your first call (REST)

Every action is a typed endpoint. Sending a message is the same send_linkedin_message operation you’d call from an agent, over HTTPS:

# full reference: docs.gtm-api.com
curl -X POST https://app.gtm-api.com/linkedin/v4/api/linkedin-messages/send \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GTM_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "linkedin_account_sid": "ln_ac_...", "ln_id": "ACoAA...", "text": "Thanks for connecting!" }'

Every parameter, guard and error code for this call is on the developer docs. The linkedin-api-examples repo on GitHub has the same call as a runnable script, in curl and TypeScript, next to nine more covering search, enrichment and connection requests.

Or skip the code (MCP)

The same tools are exposed over the Model Context Protocol, so an agent in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any other MCP client calls them with no integration code. On GTM API the LinkedIn side is 190+ typed tools in 12 toolsets, from accounts, messaging and the network to search, enrichment and the account’s own health. The agent works from the typed definitions, which is what lets it pick send_linkedin_connection_request on its own and still sit inside the same server-side limits a REST call gets. An outward action can run as a preview the agent shows you first and sends only once you confirm.

Authorization is an OAuth consent screen when a person is there to approve it, and an API key when nobody is. Setup per client, the toolset list and what an agent can and cannot do are on the LinkedIn MCP server page. The free MCP config generator writes the config block for your client, and there are step-by-step versions for Claude and ChatGPT.

Frequently Asked Questions

Read next on this topic

Sources & Further Reading

• LinkedIn / Microsoft Learn, Getting Access to LinkedIn APIs (official products and permissions, and the Compliance section marked closed with permissions listed for reference only), last updated 26 June 2025
• LinkedIn / Microsoft Learn, Invitations API (POST /v2/invitations, the invitee URN and the optional message body, restricted to approved partners), last updated 9 May 2023 · Messages API (POST /v2/messages, MEMBER_TO_MEMBER, and the requirement that a message follow a specific member action, with automated and scheduled events excluded), last updated 9 May 2023
• LinkedIn / Microsoft Learn, Message Ads API (a Message Ad is delivered to a member’s InMail inbox, content created through POST /rest/inMailContents with a sender and no recipient field, and a test send that goes to the authenticated member), last updated 24 June 2026
• LinkedIn, Developer Solutions · Become a SNAP partner
• LinkedIn / Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn API documentation index (the six business lines), read 1 September 2026 · Marketing API versioning (the LinkedIn-Version header on the /rest paths), last updated 15 October 2026
• LinkedIn / Microsoft Learn, API rate limits (the application and member tiers, the midnight UTC reset, the Analytics tab), last updated 20 August 2025 · Increasing API access (the Community Management and Advertising Development-tier quotas), last updated 28 July 2026 · Verified on LinkedIn (5,000 calls a day), last updated 10 December 2025
• LinkedIn / Microsoft Learn, People Typeahead API (followers only, ten profiles a prefix), last updated 15 April 2026 · Unified Search (the Recruiter System Connect iframe), last updated 18 June 2025
• LinkedIn / Microsoft Learn, Restricted use cases (the 24-hour storage limit on member profile data), last updated 29 August 2025
• LinkedIn / Microsoft Learn, Posts API (the member and organization permissions), last updated 13 May 2026 · Community Management overview (r_member_social closed), last updated 15 May 2026
• LinkedIn / Microsoft Learn, Job Posting API overview (closed to new partnerships, no reading or searching of listings)
• Ninth Circuit, hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, No. 17-16783 (18 April 2022, on remand: the injunction against LinkedIn stands, CFAA “without authorization” likely does not reach public profiles)
• Proskauer, on the district court ruling of 4 November 2022 (N.D. Cal., 17-cv-03301-EMC: the User Agreement bars scraping, LinkedIn won on the fake accounts hiQ’s contractors used, and hiQ’s waiver defence was left for trial. The parties settled a month later on a $500K consent judgment)
• Steven Goh (Proxycurl / Nubela), “Proxycurl Shuts Down. Thank you.” (July 2025, the shutdown announcement and the January 2025 lawsuit)
• gtm-api.com, developer documentation · linkedin-api-examples (GitHub)
• Related: Best LinkedIn API · LinkedIn API pricing · LinkedIn MCP server · LinkedIn automation · LinkedIn automation API · Safe LinkedIn automation · LinkedIn connection limits · LinkedIn API rate limits · Sales Navigator API · LinkedIn API access · LinkedIn profile data API · Connect LinkedIn to Claude · LinkedIn messaging API · LinkedIn integrations · Automate LinkedIn with n8n · LinkedIn scraping vs API · LinkedIn jobs API · LinkedIn API documentation · LinkedIn posts API · LinkedIn search API · What happened to Proxycurl · Is scraping LinkedIn legal?

Michael SalamatovGTM engineerRuns the gtm-api.com blog. Covers LinkedIn limits, account health and the API side of outbound.in

Last updated: November 2026 · Definitions and benchmarks verified at time of publication