Sales Navigator Search — leads (people) & accounts (companies)

Sales Navigator Search

Search LinkedIn Sales Navigator for leads (people) or accounts (companies). Requires a LinkedIn account with an active Sales Navigator subscription.

Two ways to search

1. Structured: pass category + optional keywords + filters
2. URL-based: pass a Sales Navigator search url from your browser — filters are extracted automatically

Accepted url shapes

Sales Navigator is a SPA and writes its filter state into the hash fragment (#query=...), not the search string. The parser accepts both, plus several common paste artefacts:

• https://www.linkedin.com/sales/search/people#query=(...)&sessionId=... — what the browser address bar shows (most common)
• https://www.linkedin.com/sales/search/people?query=(...) — older / shared-link form
• /sales/search/lead and /sales/search/account path aliases (LinkedIn uses both)
• Protocol-less paste (www.linkedin.com/sales/search/people#query=...)
• Surrounding whitespace, quotes/backticks, & from rich-text paste

Rejected with a clear 400 so you don't get unfiltered results:

• Saved-list URLs (/sales/lists/people/...) — these aren't searches; open the list and click "Search" to get a /sales/search/... URL
• URLs with no query (?sessionId=... only) — copy the URL again after filters finish loading
• URLs whose query has no keywords and no filters (#query=(spellCorrectionEnabled:true)) — same fix

Sales Navigator vs Classic search

Sales Navigator returns richer data than classic LinkedIn search:

• People: tenure at company/role, premium status, open profile flag, pending invitation status, detailed positions
• Companies: headcount (employee count)
• More advanced filters: seniority, function, tenure, include/exclude for company & industry

Resolving filter IDs

Filters like location, industry, company, and school require LinkedIn numeric IDs. Use GET /search/linkedin/parameters to convert text (e.g. "San Francisco") into IDs.

Pagination

Default page size: 25, max: 25. Use start (offset) and count to paginate. Check hasMore and paging.total in the response. When passing url, a ?page=N (or #…&page=N) in the URL is honored — explicit start still wins if both are provided.

Credits

Profile URLs returned

Each item carries profileUrl (public /in/...) and salesNavUrl (/sales/...). Sales Navigator does not return canonical vanity slugs (e.g. /in/john-doe) — it returns LinkedIn's encrypted profile id, so profileUrl is https://www.linkedin.com/in/<encrypted-id> (e.g. /in/ACwAAA0-26UB...). These URLs are clickable and redirect to the canonical vanity URL when opened in a browser, and they are accepted anywhere our API takes a profile URL (visit, connect, message, etc.).

Upgrading to canonical vanity URLs (optional)

To resolve /in/<encrypted-id> → /in/<vanity-slug> (e.g. /in/john-doe), call POST /resolve/linkedin/profiles with the URLs, URNs, or raw encrypted ids. The endpoint returns publicIdentifier + a canonical profileUrl, and returns publicIdentifier + a canonical profileUrl.

POST /resolve/linkedin/profiles
{
  "inputs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/ACwAAA0-26UBSvneYv1dZ1sfAT_NZHjmOb5qk2s",
    "urn:li:fsd_profile:ACwAAAaK0QIBxcI7cceYW8eas-3uVGwgOTW8s_k"
  ]
}