LinkedIn People Search API

Search LinkedIn for people by name, job title, company, school or location, and get their public profile data back as clean JSON. No LinkedIn account, no login, and no session cookie.

Give it a name like "John Smith", or a professional search like "Engineering Manager at Stripe", and it returns the matching people with their profile URL, headline, employer and location. For every person whose profile is public, it also returns their about text, full work history, education, follower count, photo and languages.

Find people on LinkedIn by name, job title, company or school

Every field is optional, and you combine whichever ones describe the person you want:

Search by	Field	Example
Full name	firstName + lastName	Jane Doe
Job title	jobTitle	Engineering Manager
Company	company	Stripe
School or university	school	Stanford University
Location	location	San Francisco
Anything else	keywords	rust, fintech, open source

Two common shapes:

{ "firstName": "John", "lastName": "Smith", "location": "San Francisco", "maxResults": 25 }

{ "jobTitle": "Engineering Manager", "company": "Stripe", "maxResults": 50 }

What the LinkedIn People Search API returns

One row per person. Every row carries the discovery fields; rows for people with a public profile also carry the enrichment fields.

Field	Always present	Description
profileUrl	yes	Canonical profile URL, tracking parameters stripped
publicIdentifier	yes	Profile slug, a stable deduplication key
fullName	yes	The person's name
headline	yes	Professional headline, usually role and employer
currentCompany	yes	Current employer
searchRank	yes	Position in the results, starting at 1
isEnriched	yes	Whether the full profile was read
about	when public	The person's About text
experience	when public	Work history: company, company URL, location, role, dates
education	when public	Schools, with URLs and dates
locationLocality	when public	City or metro area
locationCountry	when public	Two-letter country code
followerCount	when public	Followers on the profile
profilePhotoUrl	when public	Public profile photo
languages	when public	Languages listed
awards	when public	Honours and awards listed

Example row:

{
  "resultType": "person",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkosoy",
  "publicIdentifier": "jkosoy",
  "fullName": "Jamie Kosoy",
  "headline": "Engineering Manager at Stripe",
  "currentCompany": "Stripe",
  "currentCompanyUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/stripe",
  "locationLocality": "Berkeley, California, United States",
  "locationCountry": "US",
  "followerCount": 3027,
  "experience": [
    {
      "organizationName": "Stripe",
      "organizationUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/stripe",
      "organizationLocation": "San Francisco, California, United States"
    }
  ],
  "education": [
    { "organizationName": "Carnegie Mellon University", "startDate": "2001", "endDate": "2005" }
  ],
  "isEnriched": true,
  "searchRank": 1
}

How much of a profile comes back, honestly

Not every LinkedIn member makes their profile public. People who have not return nothing to any signed-out visitor, which includes this API and every other tool that does not use your login.

In practice that means coverage depends on who you search for. A targeted professional search returns full profiles for nearly everyone: a test of "Engineering Manager at Stripe" enriched 10 of 10. A very common name searched deep into the results falls a long way below that, because those pages surface dormant accounts.

You are never billed for a profile that would not open. Delivering a person and reading their full profile are two separate charges, and the second one only applies when the data actually came back.

LinkedIn people search without a login or session cookie

This API only ever reads pages that are public to anyone on the internet. It does not ask for your LinkedIn credentials, it has no field to paste a session cookie into, and it stores nothing about your account. There is no field for li_at because the code has no way to use one.

That matters because some scrapers ask you to hand over your own LinkedIn session cookie. Doing that puts your personal account at risk of restriction, and the risk lands on you rather than on the tool. This one cannot put you in that position.

What it also means, stated plainly: this API does not return email addresses, phone numbers, connection degree, or mutual connections. None of those appear on a public profile, so no signed-out tool can honestly promise them.

LinkedIn API pricing: pay per person, not per page of results

Billing is per person delivered. There is no per-run fee, no minimum, and no charge for a block of search results you did not want.

Event	When you are charged
Person found	Once per person delivered, with profile URL, name, headline and employer. Never for a duplicate inside the same run.
Person enriched	Only when that person's public profile was opened and actually returned data.

Two consequences worth knowing. Setting enrichProfiles to false gives you a fast, cheaper discovery-only run. And because the second charge is conditional, a search that finds mostly private profiles costs meaningfully less than one that finds public ones.

Several tools in this category bill per page of 25 results, charged whether or not you wanted all 25 and charged again when you ask for the full profile. This one does not work that way. Current prices are always on the Store page.

Use the LinkedIn People Search API from Claude with MCP

Add this API as a tool in Claude Code (free trial), Claude Cowork (free trial), or any other MCP client through the hosted Apify MCP server:

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=actors,docs,johnvc/linkedin-people-search-api

Here actors and docs are the standard tool categories, and the third entry is this API. Once it is connected you can ask in plain language, for example "find engineering managers at Stripe and tell me which ones previously worked at a payments company", and the agent will run the search and read the results itself.

Apify's MCP integration docs: https://docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/mcp

💸 Pay per run with crypto (x402)

The LinkedIn People Search API supports agentic payments via the x402 protocol. AI agents and MCP clients can pay for runs in USDC (on Base) with no Apify account or API token needed: point your agent at the Apify MCP server and it can discover, pay for, and run this Actor autonomously. Read the Apify x402 announcement for details.

LinkedIn Recruiter and Sales Navigator alternative for sourcing

For sourcing work, the useful comparison is not feature-for-feature but cost-per-lookup. Recruiter and Sales Navigator are seat-based subscriptions built for a person clicking through a UI. This is a metered API built for a script or an agent, so it suits list building, enrichment pipelines and scheduled monitoring rather than interactive browsing.

It does not replace InMail, saved projects, or anything that needs to act as your logged-in account. It replaces the part where you need structured data about a lot of people at once.

LinkedIn alumni search by school or university

Set school to search by education. Combine it with jobTitle or location to narrow an alumni list down to the people worth contacting:

{ "school": "Stanford University", "jobTitle": "Product Manager", "maxResults": 100 }

Integrations and API access

Runs can be triggered from the Apify API, the JavaScript and Python clients, or the CLI, and results can be pushed onward with Apify integrations to Zapier, Make, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack, Airtable and webhooks. Schedules let you re-run a saved search daily or weekly and only act on the people who are new since last time, which is the usual way to watch a competitor's team or a school's graduating cohort.

Every run writes a dataset you can pull as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

How to get started

1. Open the Actor: LinkedIn People Search API on Apify Store
2. Enter a name, or a job title and company.
3. Set how many people you want with maxResults.
4. Leave enrichProfiles on for full profiles, or switch it off for a quick, cheaper list.
5. Run it, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel.

🔗 Related Tools

• LinkedIn Profile API - when you already have profile URLs and want them scraped in bulk.
• LinkedIn Company API - firmographics for the companies these people work at.
• LinkedIn Jobs API - open roles and salary data.
• LinkedIn Posts API - what a person or company has been posting.
• Crunchbase Company API - funding and investor data to qualify an employer.

For contrast, LinkedIn People Search Scraper by powerai covers similar ground but carries a per-run start fee on top of its per-result price and returns no about text, work history or education. Worth a look if you want to compare output shapes before you commit.

Frequently asked questions

Can I search someone on LinkedIn without having an account?

Yes, for the parts of LinkedIn that are public. This API reads only pages that any signed-out visitor can see, so it needs no account of yours. Members who have made their profile private are not visible that way, and this API will not show them either.

Can someone tell if you search them up on LinkedIn?

No. Profile view notifications come from views made by a logged-in member. This API is never logged in as you or anyone else, so nothing is attributed to your account and nobody is notified.

Does LinkedIn have a people search API?

Not a public one. LinkedIn's official API programs are partner-gated and do not offer people search, which is why this exists. You get the developer experience of an API, structured input in and structured rows out, over data that LinkedIn only publishes as web pages.

Is this a scraper, and will it get me blocked?

Under the hood it is a scraper, reading public pages the same way a search engine does. Nothing is attributed to you: it never signs in, never uses your cookies, and never touches your account, so there is no account of yours to block. Requests are paced and retried on transient failures.

Does this work as an MCP server for AI agents?

Yes. Point any MCP client at https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=actors,docs,johnvc/linkedin-people-search-api and it becomes a callable tool for your agent. The input fields are documented for agent readers, so a model can pick sensible arguments without extra prompting.

Can I run this on a schedule and only get new people?

Yes. Apify Schedules can re-run a saved search on any cadence you like, hourly through monthly. Each run writes its own dataset, and publicIdentifier is stable per person, so comparing against the previous run tells you exactly who is new. That is the usual setup for watching a company's hiring or tracking a school's recent graduates.

Can I connect this to my other tools?

Yes. Results can be pushed to Zapier, Make, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack, Airtable or a webhook through Apify integrations, and you can call the API directly from the Apify JavaScript or Python client if you would rather pull than push.

How do I search LinkedIn by name and company?

Set firstName and lastName for the person and company for the employer. Adding the company is the single most effective way to cut through a common name, because it filters to people whose public profile mentions that employer.

Why did some people come back without work history?

Their profile is not public. LinkedIn shows nothing to signed-out visitors for those members, so there is no work history to read. Those rows still include the profile URL, name, headline and employer from the search results, and you are not charged the enrichment fee for them.

How do I search for alumni on LinkedIn?

Use the school field with the university name. Combine it with jobTitle, company or location to narrow a large alumni body down to a workable list.

Does this return email addresses or phone numbers?

No. Neither appears on a public LinkedIn profile, so no cookie-free tool can return them truthfully. Use a dedicated email-finding service on the profile URLs or names this API gives you.

I got fewer people than I asked for. Why?

The search ran out of matching public results. Narrow searches genuinely have fewer people in them, and public results thin out as you page deeper. Loosen a filter, drop the location, or search a company rather than an exact name to widen the pool.

Examples

Ready to run task pages built on this API. Each one opens with its own working setup, so you can run it on your account in one click and then swap in your own search.

• Find People on LinkedIn in Claude via MCP - wire this Actor into an MCP client such as Claude Code (free trial) and let the agent search by job title and company. No session cookie is handed over, because there is no cookie field to hand over.
• Find Employees of a Company on LinkedIn - give a company and a job title, get one flat row per person with name, headline, current company, location and profile URL, ready for a prospect list.
• LinkedIn People Search API for Python - pip install apify-client, no OAuth and no application review. Rows key on publicIdentifier, so results deduplicate across runs.
• Export LinkedIn People Search Results to CSV - the flat overview view downloads straight to CSV or Excel with no nested columns to unpick: name, headline, current company, location, followers and profile URL.
• Track Job Changes on LinkedIn Monthly - re-run one saved search on a schedule and diff the results to see who moved. Enrichment is switched off so the recurring run stays light.

Each page has an AI readable .md version at the same address with .md on the end.

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Last Updated: 2026.09.02