Linkedin Mass People Profile Finder: Posts and Articles About Them

Bulk LinkedIn profile finder that also surfaces the LinkedIn posts and Pulse articles that carry each person's name. Feed it a list of free-text queries (name, company, title) and for each one it returns the same public LinkedIn profile URL the base actor already resolves, plus the other public LinkedIn pages — not the profile — that the search engine's index finds carrying that name today.

This is built for a researcher, comms/PR person or partnerships lead who already knows which person they mean and needs to know what LinkedIn publicly carries about them before a meeting: a shortlist candidate, a keynote speaker, an interview subject, a founder being introduced to a client.

What it does

• Runs the base actor's own site:linkedin.com/in <query> lookup completely unchanged to resolve linkedin — nothing about how the profile URL is found is touched.
• Additionally runs one extra search per selected record type, each on a different LinkedIn URL path:
  • Posts — site:linkedin.com/posts <query>
  • Articles — site:linkedin.com/pulse <query> (long-form Pulse articles)
  • News stories — site:linkedin.com/news <query>
• Returns every surviving record as an entry in a new records[] array, with the publisher's handle and the 19-digit activity id read straight off the link on post rows.
• Lets you drop posts published by specific handles — an employer's company page, or the person's own handle, so you can isolate what other people published.
• Keeps the base actor's auto-escalating proxy ladder (direct → Apify datacenter → Apify residential) and per-row concurrency unchanged.

Use cases

• Pre-meeting briefing — before a call or interview, see the public LinkedIn posts and articles bearing this person's name, and who published each one.
• Speaker / candidate research — check what a shortlist candidate or keynote speaker has had published about or by them on LinkedIn.
• Comms / PR prep — see what LinkedIn already carries about a person before pitching or introducing them.

This is not a bulk contact-list tool. Ordinary names with no public profile return little or nothing — in one measured sample, three of four common-name people returned zero posts. This works best for people who already have a public footprint on LinkedIn.

Input

Base fields (unchanged from the profile finder):

Field	Type	Default	Description
queries	array (required)	2 example lines	One free-text search query per line, e.g. "Michael Dell" "Dell Technologies" CEO.
proxyConfiguration	object	{"useApifyProxy": false}	Override the automatic proxy ladder. Leave default unless you have a specific reason.

New in this variant:

Field	Type	Default	Description
linkedinRecordTypes	array (select)	["Posts", "Articles"]	Which kinds of LinkedIn page to look for besides the profile: Posts, Articles (Pulse), News stories. Each type selected is one extra search per person. Turn everything off to behave exactly like the base actor.
excludePublishers	array (string list)	[]	Drop any post whose publisher handle (the part of a /posts/ link before the first underscore) matches one of these, e.g. gsk or a person's own handle. Matching is case-insensitive and partial. Articles and news stories have no handle and are never affected.

Example input

{
  "queries": [
    "\"Rand Fishkin\" SparkToro",
    "\"Emma Walmsley\" GSK"
  ],
  "linkedinRecordTypes": ["Posts", "Articles"],
  "excludePublishers": []
}

Output

One row per query, with the base linkedin, input and (on a miss) error fields unchanged, plus a new records array:

{
  "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/randfishkin",
  "input": "\"Rand Fishkin\" SparkToro",
  "records": [
    {
      "record_type": "posts",
      "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/randfishkin_how-sparktoro-built-its-affordable-scalable-activity-7227405352223260680-fjBQ",
      "url_slug": "randfishkin_how-sparktoro-built-its-affordable-scalable-activity-7227405352223260680-fjBQ",
      "publisher_handle": "randfishkin",
      "activity_id": "7227405352223260680"
    },
    {
      "record_type": "pulse",
      "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/interview-rand-fishkin-author-lost-founder-former-ceo-dan-bruton",
      "url_slug": "interview-rand-fishkin-author-lost-founder-former-ceo-dan-bruton",
      "publisher_handle": null,
      "activity_id": null
    }
  ]
}

records is always present, [] when nothing came back for that row — that is the normal result for an ordinary name, not a failure.

Field	Description
records[].record_type	posts, pulse or news — the first path segment of the link, read as-is.
records[].url	The link exactly as the search engine returned it.
records[].url_slug	Everything after the type segment, verbatim. On a Pulse link the publisher's name sits, undelimited, at the tail.
records[].publisher_handle	On post links only: the text before the first underscore. null on articles and news stories — the name is undelimited from the title on Pulse links, so it is never guessed.
records[].activity_id	On post links only: the 19-digit id after -activity-, as a string. null elsewhere.

Honest limits

• This is a search engine's index of LinkedIn, not LinkedIn's own archive. The actor never opens a LinkedIn page. What comes back is a ranked subset chosen by the search engine's relevance, capped at roughly 20 results per search, and it is never complete — running the same search twice can return a different set.
• These are pages that carry the person's name — not necessarily pages they wrote, and not necessarily pages about them. In one measured sample of 18 posts, 6 were published by the person themselves and 12 by other people or company pages; the split varied by person. No percentage of self-authorship is published anywhere, because three separate measurements produced three different numbers.
• A minority of results do not name the person at all. Inclusion is decided by the search engine's relevance, not by a name check on this actor's side — a name filter was tested and deliberately not shipped because it would have dropped roughly a third of results, including some that were clearly relevant.
• How many results you get depends heavily on the person. People who are written about on LinkedIn return a useful set. Ordinary names return very little or nothing.
• Pulse article links carry no publisher handle. The author's name sits at the end of the article's own link, run together with the title words with no separator, so it is not split out — the full link is returned as-is.
• The same article can appear more than once under different country versions of LinkedIn. Repeats of the same article within one search are collapsed to one automatically.
• There is no date filter and no publication date is returned. This was tested on this search surface and found to have no effect.
• Nothing here confirms identity. Whether the person behind a link is the person on your list is a judgement call only you can make.
• queries is still required with a 2-line prefill, inherited from the base actor — clear it or you will get two example rows you did not ask for.

FAQ

Does this require a LinkedIn login or cookie? No — everything comes from public search results, the same as the base actor.

Why is records empty for some rows? That is the normal result for a person with no public LinkedIn footprint of posts or articles under that name. It is not an error.

Why is publisher_handle always null on my Pulse results? Pulse article links put the author's name at the end of the link with no separator from the title words, so there is no reliable way to split it out. Read the full url_slug — the name is usually the tail of it.

Can I get only the posts other people wrote, not the person's own? Yes — add the person's own LinkedIn post handle to excludePublishers.