# LinkedIn Profile Scraper — Never Pay for Empty Profiles (`0xgollum/reliable-linkedin-profiles`) Actor

Bulk LinkedIn profile scraper - no cookies or login required. Pulls name, headline, location, about, full work experience and education. Built around one rule: a profile is only billed if it actually returned real data. Private, deleted, or blocked profiles are never billed.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/0xgollum/reliable-linkedin-profiles.md
- **Developed by:** [0xGollum](https://apify.com/0xgollum) (community)
- **Categories:** Lead generation, Automation, Jobs
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $3.50 / 1,000 profile results

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors/running/actors-in-store#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

Actors are web data automations that power AI and operations. They run on the Apify platform to scrape websites, process data, connect APIs, and automate workflows.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.
Actors are written with capital "A".

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.
The best way to integrate Actors is as follows.

- **AI agents and MCP clients** — the [Apify MCP server](https://docs.apify.com/integrations/mcp.md) at `https://mcp.apify.com` (remote, streamable HTTP, OAuth on first use).
- **Agentic workflows and local Actor development** — [Agent Skills](https://apify.com/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json) with the [Apify CLI](https://docs.apify.com/cli/docs.md): `npm install -g apify-cli`, then `apify login`.
- **JavaScript/TypeScript projects** — the official [JS/TS client](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md): `npm install apify-client`.
- **Python projects** — the official [Python client](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md): `pip install apify-client`.
- **Any other language** — the [REST API](https://docs.apify.com/api/v2.md).

For usage examples, see the [API](#api) section below.

For more details, see Apify documentation as [Markdown index](https://docs.apify.com/llms.txt) and [Markdown full-text](https://docs.apify.com/llms-full.txt).

# README

## Reliable LinkedIn Profiles

Scrape a batch of LinkedIn profiles, and a chunk of the results come back as private or blank. That's normal at scale — accounts get deleted, restricted, or your request gets blocked mid-batch. What's not normal is paying for every one of those empty rows anyway, buried in a CSV of a few thousand.

This one is built around a single rule: **a profile is only billed if it actually returned real data.**

### No cookies, no login — how

LinkedIn serves a genuinely public, server-rendered version of a profile (and separate `/details/experience/` and `/details/education/` pages) to logged-out visitors, for anyone who hasn't restricted their public visibility. That's the actual mechanism behind every "no cookies required" LinkedIn scraper — this one included. No account, no session token, nothing that risks a ban on your own LinkedIn login.

### What "reliable" means here, concretely

Confirmed live while building this: a plain request with no proxy gets blocked by LinkedIn within a handful of calls — not a 403, a non-standard `999` status specific to their bot defense. Sometimes the block even comes back as an HTTP 200 with a fake-looking page instead of a clean error, which is exactly the kind of thing that turns into a silently empty "successful" result on a less careful scraper.

- **Residential proxy by default** — the single biggest lever against getting blocked.
- **Session rotation, not blind retries** — if one identity gets blocked, a fresh proxy session (new IP, new cookies) is used instead of hammering the same one.
- **A confirmed private/deleted profile is not retried** — no proxy session will make a real profile out of one that isn't public, so it's skipped immediately instead of burning sessions.
- **No charge on failure** — a profile that fails every session, or turns out private/nonexistent, is logged clearly in the run and simply never pushed to the dataset.

### Input

- `profiles` (required): LinkedIn profile URLs or bare public identifiers (`williamhgates` or the full `https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates` both work)
- `include_experience` (optional, default true): fetch full work history
- `include_education` (optional, default true): fetch full education history
- `max_proxy_sessions` (optional, default 3, max 6): how many fresh proxy identities to try per profile before giving up
- `proxyConfiguration` (optional, default: Apify residential proxy)

### Output (one row per profile that returned real data)

```json
{
  "public_identifier": "williamhgates",
  "name": "Bill Gates",
  "headline": "Chair, Gates Foundation and Founder, Breakthrough Energy",
  "location": "Seattle, Washington, United States",
  "about": "...",
  "experience_count": 2,
  "education_count": 2,
  "experience": [{"title": "Co-chair", "company": "Gates Foundation", "dates": "2000 - Present"}],
  "education": [{"school": "Harvard University", "degree": null, "dates": "1973 - 1975"}]
}
```

### Known limitation — read before you buy

Only what's on the public (logged-out) version of a profile is available — that's less than what a logged-in connection sees, but it's also exactly what every "no cookies" scraper in this category is actually built on, regardless of what the marketing copy implies. Profiles with restricted public visibility will come back private/skipped, not billed.

### Pricing

Pay per result — no charge for profiles that come back private, deleted, or blocked.

# Actor input Schema

## `profiles` (type: `array`):

LinkedIn profile URLs or public identifiers (the part after /in/).

## `include_experience` (type: `boolean`):

Fetch the full experience history (titles, companies, dates).

## `include_education` (type: `boolean`):

Fetch the full education history (schools, degrees, dates).

## `max_proxy_sessions` (type: `integer`):

If LinkedIn blocks one proxy identity, retry with a fresh one, up to this many times, before giving up on a profile (and not charging for it).

## `proxyConfiguration` (type: `object`):

Residential proxy strongly recommended - LinkedIn aggressively blocks datacenter IPs (confirmed live: an unproxied request gets blocked within a handful of calls), which is the #1 cause of empty/failed runs on other scrapers.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "profiles": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates",
    "satyanadella"
  ],
  "include_experience": true,
  "include_education": true,
  "max_proxy_sessions": 3,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": [
      "RESIDENTIAL"
    ]
  }
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

No description

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "profiles": [
        "https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates",
        "satyanadella"
    ]
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("0xgollum/reliable-linkedin-profiles").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "profiles": [
        "https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates",
        "satyanadella",
    ] }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("0xgollum/reliable-linkedin-profiles").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "profiles": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates",
    "satyanadella"
  ]
}' |
apify call 0xgollum/reliable-linkedin-profiles --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,0xgollum/reliable-linkedin-profiles"
        }
    }
}

```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/v3jtgxsJLvXk7gs7U/builds/VAT49lFhu7HnpFOGH/openapi.json