LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Search LinkedIn Sales Navigator using a connected LinkedIn account. The connected account must hold an active Sales Navigator subscription — without it, Sales Navigator-specific filters return no results.

⚠️ Account Ban Risk

LinkedIn does not publish API rate limits, but it actively detects non-human usage patterns and will temporarily restrict or permanently ban accounts that exceed them. Bans hit the connected LinkedIn account itself — the user loses Sales Navigator access entirely, not just API access. There is no appeal path that restores high-volume access.

To make this hard to get wrong, the bundle enforces two server-side caps per connected LinkedIn account:

• 500 calls per UTC day. Hard ceiling, resets at 00:00 UTC. Calls past the cap fail with HTTP 429 and a message telling you when the budget resets.
• 20 calls per minute. Catches runaway loops before they chew through the daily budget. Same HTTP 429 shape.

Both caps are keyed by the connected LinkedIn account, so re-binding the same account through a fresh credential does not reset the count — the budget belongs to the LinkedIn account, not to the credential row.

Even with the caps in place, treat each connected account as a single human operator:

• Pace within the day. Don't burst — leave seconds between calls and avoid running long parallel loops against one account.
• Spread load across multiple connected accounts when a workflow legitimately needs higher throughput, instead of pushing one account harder.
• Stop on the first restriction signal (HTTP 429 from this bundle, "account disconnected", or repeated empty results from previously-working queries). Continuing through these escalates a soft warning into a hard ban.

Capability

• Search people on Sales Navigator with full filter support (title, seniority, function, geography, current company, past company, industry, school, years in current role, years in current company, etc.).
• Search accounts (companies) on Sales Navigator with filters for industry, headcount, headcount growth, geography, fortune ranking, and more.
• Look up a specific person or company profile by LinkedIn URN or vanity URL.
• Send InMail and connection requests through the connected account's normal LinkedIn quota.
• Read and reply to messages in the connected account's LinkedIn inbox.

Identity Model

• All actions are taken as the connected LinkedIn account. Profile views, search appearances, and InMails count against that account's normal LinkedIn limits.
• The connected account's relationships (1st/2nd/3rd-degree, mutual connections, premium visibility) determine what is visible on every search and profile fetch.
• Sales Navigator filters that require a Sales Navigator subscription will return zero results if the connected account does not currently have one — there is no fallback to public LinkedIn search.

Search Filter Syntax

LinkedIn search filters expect bare numeric id strings (regex ^\d+$) for every id-shaped field — locations, industries, companies, schools, groups, postal codes, saved-search ids, recent-search ids. Pass "1441", NOT "urn:li:company:1441". URN-prefixed strings are rejected with HTTP 400. Resolve freeform names ("San Francisco Bay Area", "Software Development") via the search-parameter resolver tool and pass its id field straight through.

A few axes are not id-shaped and use small enum integers:

• Seniority: 1=Owner, 2=Partner, 3=CXO, 4=VP, 5=Director, 6=Manager, 7=Senior, 8=Entry, 9=Training, 10=Unpaid.
• Functions: 1=Accounting, 4=Business Development, 8=Engineering, 15=Operations, 25=Sales.

Classic and Sales Navigator share the filter shape but use distinct id namespaces for industry and location. The resolver's service parameter selects which namespace to resolve against (CLASSIC vs SALES_NAVIGATOR) — match it to the eventual search api. Resolved ids are not portable across the two surfaces; resolve once per target api.

Filter shape per surface:

• Sales Navigator people: nested {include: ["1441", ...], exclude: ["..."]} for location, industry, company, school, role, seniority, function, past_company, past_role, company_location.
• Classic people: flat arrays ["1441", ...] for industry, location, company, school, service.

Pagination

Search results are returned in pages. Prefer cursor (or offset when the connected API generation uses offset pagination) from the previous response — do not re-issue the same search in a tight loop to “get the next page”. Use limit (default 25, max 100) for page size. Sales Navigator caps total results per saved-search query around 2,500 — for broader pulls, slice the search by additional filters rather than hammering pagination.

Tool Patterns

The bundle deliberately keeps the surface small with two patterns worth knowing:

• Powerful GETs. A profile lookup accepts an include array that fans out related feeds (recent posts, comments, reactions) in parallel — one call returns the full research view. The inbox tool covers both browsing chats and reading one chat's messages: pass a chat_id to drill into a thread, omit it to list the inbox.
• Upsert-style writes. A single send-message tool covers both starting a new conversation (pass attendees) and replying in an existing thread (pass chat_id). To send the opening message as an InMail, set inmail=true with a subject (consumes one InMail credit from the connected account's premium subscription). Connection invitations live in their own tool because LinkedIn meters them on a separate quota.

Gotchas

• InMails consume the connected account's LinkedIn quota — typical Sales Navigator subscriptions include 50 InMails per month and they accrue against that exact pool. Spending them via the API is identical to spending them in the LinkedIn UI.
• Search results cap around 2,500 per query — narrow the filters instead of paginating past that point; LinkedIn returns empty pages.
• A disconnected account stops working silently — if LinkedIn invalidates the session (password change, new device challenge, suspicious-activity lockout), every call returns an "account disconnected" error and the user must reconnect via the same in-app flow.
• Sales Navigator search returns HTTP 403 when the connected account has no SN seat. The search tool maps this 403 to an explicit "no active Sales Navigator subscription" error and tells you to fall back to api='classic' for public LinkedIn search. Do NOT retry the SN endpoint after a 403 — Unipile exposes no separate seat-status surface, so the 403 is authoritative for that connected account. Re-issue the same query with api='classic' to use the public LinkedIn search instead.
• Rate limits are LinkedIn-side and unpublished — the API surfaces no documented quota. Aggressive querying on a single connected account triggers LinkedIn's anti-scraping detection and permanently bans the LinkedIn account, not just the API session. The ban is on the human's LinkedIn login. See the "Account Ban Risk" section above for daily volume guidance.