Updated October 2026

LinkedIn scraping in 2026: how each route works

You need LinkedIn data in a sheet, a CRM or an AI agent's context. Before you pick a tool, check where it reads from, whose account does the reading, what it charges per record and what LinkedIn's rules say about it.

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LinkedIn scraping is collecting LinkedIn data with software instead of copying it by hand: people and company searches, profiles, company pages, posts and the people who engaged with them, and job listings. Teams use it to build lead lists, keep a CRM current, follow hiring and job moves, and give AI agents context. The data comes by four routes: LinkedIn's own APIs, a browser extension in your own session, a scraper vendor or a dataset, and an API that reads through a LinkedIn account you own. They differ most in whose account does the reading and in what they charge for.

Our product

What gtm-api.com sells

Disclosure first: gtm-api.com publishes this page and sells one of the routes on it, so that route is described first. It is a LinkedIn API and MCP server that reads LinkedIn through accounts you own and connect, and returns typed JSON: people, company, Sales Navigator and Recruiter searches, full profiles and their sections, company pages and employees, posts with their comments, reactions and reshares, and job searches.

Accounts you own. Searches and profile reads run on the LinkedIn accounts you connect, each signed in by you inside its own cloud browser. Name the account in the call, or leave it out and the service picks one of yours with budget left.
Live reads. A search runs again on every call and returns one page of what that account sees on LinkedIn. A profile read returns the fields the account is allowed to see, so contact details come back only from an account that is a first-degree connection of the person.
Budgets on the server. Each account has a daily budget per kind of call, checked before the call leaves: at full warm-up, 100 searches and 80 profile, company and post reads a day, with calls of one kind spaced out one at a time. A call over budget is answered with the moment it can run again.
Collectors. An auto-scrape saves a LinkedIn or Sales Navigator search, runs it on a schedule and files each person or company once, however many runs find it.

Pricing is per connected account, from $10/account, and calls are not metered, so searches and profile reads cost nothing on top of the account. The free plan runs one account with no card, at up to 15 scraping actions and 12 enrichments a day.

What LinkedIn data is used for

Most LinkedIn scraping serves one of five jobs, and each leans on a different kind of record.

Lead lists. A people or company search, often in Sales Navigator, exported row by row. On gtm-api.com a search row is an identity (a name, a profile id and a picture), and the details come from reading each profile after it.
Enrichment. Headline, current role, company, experience and skills, added to a CRM or a sheet. A profile shows an email address only to first-degree connections, so most email tools look the address up somewhere else.
Engagement lists. The people who commented on, reacted to or reshared a post, read as a list of warm leads. LinkedIn's own APIs return no other member's posts at all.
Hiring signals. Job listings and a company's people, read as a sign that the company is growing or changing.
Context for AI agents. A profile and its recent posts in the agent's context before it writes, read through an API or an MCP server.

The four routes to LinkedIn data

The routes part ways on two questions: whose LinkedIn account does the reading, and what you are left maintaining. Our own product sits in the first row, and the other examples come from each vendor's own pages, read on the dates in Sources.

Route	What it returns	Whose account does the reading	What you maintain	Examples
An API that reads through an account you connect	What that account can see: searches, full profiles, company pages, posts and who engaged, jobs	Yours, connected and signed in by you	Your code. The vendor keeps up with LinkedIn's pages	gtm-api.com, Unipile, Linked API
LinkedIn's own APIs	The signed-in member's own profile and, with partner approval, the posts of Pages you administer. No endpoint returns another member's profile	None. An app you register, with partner approval for most data	The app review, and LinkedIn's storage rules: most member profile data for 24 hours	Sign In with LinkedIn, the Posts API
A browser extension	What your own browser shows, exported to a file	Yours, in the browser you use every day	Exports you start by hand from the browser	Evaboot, for Sales Navigator
A scraper vendor or a dataset	Public pages collected for you, live or as a stored copy sold by the record	The vendor's own setup, or your session cookie when the scraper asks for one	Inputs, runs and the bill. A scraper you run yourself also needs proxies and fixes when pages change	Apify actors, Bright Data

The lines blur. Bright Data sells both a scraper billed per record and ready-made LinkedIn datasets, and Apify is a marketplace of more than a thousand LinkedIn actors by different authors: some need no LinkedIn account and some ask for your session cookies, so the actor you pick decides which row you are in.

What each route costs

The routes charge for different things, so their prices compare only once you know the unit. Read on the dates in Sources:

Per connected account. On gtm-api.com from $10/account a month, with calls not metered and a free plan for one account. Unipile charges €49 a month for up to 10 accounts, and Linked API $69 a seat a month, one seat per account.
Per record or per result. The Apify actors people run for LinkedIn charge about $1 to $10 per 1,000 results, on top of a platform plan from $0 or $19 a month. Bright Data bills its scraper per record, with 5,000 records a month free, and sells LinkedIn datasets at about $0.0025 a record with a $250 minimum.
Per credit. Evaboot's plans are $29, $49 and $99 a month for 400, 1,000 and 3,000 credits, one credit per lead exported, and it needs a Sales Navigator seat of your own on top.
No price, an approval instead. LinkedIn's own APIs publish no price: access is rationed by partner approval, and what opens without approval covers sign-in and posting, not reading other members.

A per-record price grows with every lookup and with every re-check of a record you already hold. A per-account price grows with the number of accounts you run, whatever they read.

What each route puts at risk

A route that reads through a LinkedIn session puts that account on the line, and LinkedIn publishes few of the limits that apply to it. It gives free accounts a monthly allowance of searching and browsing that it calls the commercial use limit, which resets at midnight PST on the 1st of each month and shows no counter. Other figures people quote are observed, not published. The rest of the risk depends on the route:

Your account, under a tool's budget. Ask who sets the daily budget, whether a new account starts lower, and whether the budget is checked on the server before each call. On gtm-api.com the platform sets it per account and per kind of call, and checks it before every call.
Your session cookie. A cookie pasted into a scraper is a live credential: whatever runs with it runs as you, on your account, at whatever pace the scraper chooses.
No account of yours. A logged-out scraper or a dataset puts no account of yours on the line. It returns only what LinkedIn shows a signed-out visitor, or a copy as old as the last crawl.
The vendor. A product built on one scraping vendor inherits its legal position. LinkedIn sued Proxycurl's operator in January 2025, and the service shut down that July.
The data. A scraped profile is personal data about a named person, so data protection law sets what you may keep and for how long, and LinkedIn's terms for its own API cap storage of most member profile data at 24 hours.

Where LinkedIn's rules and the law stand

LinkedIn's User Agreement, in section 8.2, tells members not to "Scrape or copy profiles and information of others through any means (including crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons, and any other technology or manual work)". Everyone with a LinkedIn account has accepted it, so collecting data through a member's session goes against that clause whichever tool does it. No tool changes that sentence, ours included.

The law is a separate question that splits in three: whether scraping is a computer crime, whether it breaches a contract, and what data protection law lets you keep. In the United States, the Ninth Circuit held in 2022 that scraping public pages without logging in is unlikely to be a crime, and the same case later found the scraping breached LinkedIn's terms. The fines have landed on data protection: France's regulator fined a LinkedIn contact scraper €240,000 in December 2024. Each question is answered in full on the page below.

Free LinkedIn data tools

The data tools on this site run in your browser or on an account you connect. The first is live: the post date extractor reads the exact time a post or a comment went up out of its link, with no request to LinkedIn and nothing to sign up for.

For developers

Scraping LinkedIn from code or an AI agent

LinkedIn's own APIs do not read other members: no endpoint takes a profile link and returns that person's data, and nothing official returns another member's posts. Code and agents read LinkedIn through an account-based API instead, which runs the read on an account you connect and returns typed fields, or through a scraper API that returns what it collected.

On gtm-api.com the REST API and the MCP server are one contract: each of the server's 250+ typed tools maps to one endpoint, under the same per-account budgets. An agent can run a search, read the profiles behind it and pull a post's commenters with no scraper in between.

# one live page of a people search, on your account
POST /api/linkedin-scraping/search-people
# the profile behind each row
POST /api/linkedin-enrichment/person-full-profile
# who commented on, or reacted to, a post
POST /api/linkedin-scraping/get-post-comments
POST /api/linkedin-scraping/get-post-reactors
# a saved search that keeps collecting
POST /api/linkedin-auto-scrapes

# the same reads as typed MCP tools
scrape_linkedin_search_people · enrich_linkedin_person_full_profile

One typed contract for REST and MCP

Questions about LinkedIn scraping

What is a LinkedIn scraper?

Software that collects data from LinkedIn instead of a person copying it by hand: search results, profiles, company pages, posts and the people who engaged with them, and job listings. It comes as a browser extension, as a hosted scraper or dataset sold by the record, or as an API that reads through a LinkedIn account you connect. LinkedIn's own APIs are the fourth route, and they return little about anyone but the signed-in member.

Is scraping LinkedIn legal?

It depends on which question you mean. In the United States, scraping public pages without logging in is unlikely to be a computer crime after the Ninth Circuit's 2022 ruling in hiQ v. LinkedIn. LinkedIn's User Agreement forbids scraping for everyone with an account, so collecting through a member's session breaches that contract whatever the tool. Data protection law decides what you may keep about named people, and that is where the fines have landed.

Can you scrape LinkedIn without an account?

Partly. Public profiles show to signed-out visitors in a trimmed form, company pages and job listings show to them too, and logged-out scrapers and datasets read those. Searches, full profiles, Sales Navigator and contact details sit behind a login, so any route that returns them reads through somebody's account, and with an extension, a pasted cookie or an account-based API that account is yours.

How much does a LinkedIn scraper cost?

It depends on the unit. On gtm-api.com the price is per connected account, from $10/account a month, with calls not metered and a free plan for one account. Scrapers and datasets charge per record instead: the Apify actors people run for LinkedIn cost about $1 to $10 per 1,000 results. Extensions charge per credit, from $29 a month at Evaboot plus a Sales Navigator seat.

What data can you get from LinkedIn?

Searches return people, companies, posts and jobs. Profiles come with experience, education and skills, company pages with their employees, and posts with their comments, reactions and reshares. Email addresses and phone numbers show only to first-degree connections, so a route that reads through your account returns them only for your connections, and most email tools find the address somewhere else.

Sources

Read on the dates shown. LinkedIn's pages are closed to automated re-reads, so the LinkedIn quotes are carried over from this site's earlier reads, as dated.

gtm-api.com, developer documentation: People and company search, Find an email or phone number for a profile, Collect leads with an auto-scrape, Smart limits and warmup, Billing and plans and the API reference. Read 15 October 2026.
gtm-api.com, pricing. Read 15 October 2026.
gtm-api.com, LinkedIn API pricing (Linked API's monthly seat price and Bright Data's dataset price, read 22 September 2026), Apify LinkedIn scraper (the actor prices, read 5 September 2026), LinkedIn profile data API (the official profile endpoints and the storage cap), Is scraping LinkedIn legal? (hiQ and the French fine) and LinkedIn scraping vs an API (the Proxycurl dates).
LinkedIn, User Agreement, section 8.2, as quoted across this site.
LinkedIn Help, Commercial use limit, as checked for the limits calculator on 14 October 2026.
Unipile, API pricing. Read 14 October 2026.
Linked API, pricing (the monthly rate per seat). Read 22 September 2026.
Evaboot, pricing (the plans, the credit and the Sales Navigator seat it needs). Read 15 October 2026.
Apify, pricing (the platform plans). Read 15 October 2026.
Bright Data, LinkedIn scraper (billed per record, the free records). Read 15 October 2026. Its LinkedIn datasets, read 22 September 2026.

Read LinkedIn through an account you own

The free plan connects one LinkedIn account to the full API and MCP server, with every search and profile read under a daily budget in writing. No card, no end date.

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