LinkedIn Advanced Search: Filters on Free, Premium and Sales Navigator

LinkedIn's advanced search is the All filters panel on the search results page, and how much of it you get depends on your plan. This guide shows where it is, which filters each plan gives you, and how to keep a good search working once you have built it.

The short version. Type anything in the search bar, choose People, and open All filters – that is LinkedIn's advanced search. A free account filters by connection degree, location, current and past company, school, industry, profile language and a few more, and shows up to 250 results per search. Premium adds little to people search beyond filters such as "Actively hiring" – Premium Business mainly raises how much you can search each month. Sales Navigator is the full advanced search: 50+ lead and account filters, including function, seniority, years of experience, headcount, recent job changes and, on Advanced plans, buyer intent, with up to 2,500 results and saved searches that send weekly alerts. To keep a good search working, save it in Sales Navigator, or re-run it on a schedule from your own code or AI agent and keep only the people you have not seen before.

How to do an advanced search on LinkedIn

1. Type a word, a title or a name in the search bar at the top of any LinkedIn page.
2. Choose People from the result categories.
3. Open All filters. The most-used filters sit along the top of the results; All filters holds the rest (LinkedIn Help).
4. Set your filters and select Show results.

Three things LinkedIn's own Help pages say that most guides leave out:

• The search box reads natural language now. "LinkedIn's updated search experience can understand the meaning behind your query, not just exact keywords", and that mode does not support quotes – for exact matching, LinkedIn points you to Boolean (LinkedIn Help).
• The result count is an estimate. "Search results are always approximate and the actual results may differ from the results counter" (same page).
• You can re-run a search without rebuilding it. Recent searches appear under the search bar and re-run when you click them (LinkedIn Help). The results page URL also carries your filters, so a bookmarked results URL opens the same search again.

LinkedIn search filters by plan

Sources: LinkedIn Help on people search filters, company search, free and Premium search results, the commercial use limit, Boolean search and its operator limits, Sales Navigator filter definitions, the Sales Navigator results limit and saved searches. LinkedIn introduces its free filter list with "such as", so treat it as the documented set rather than a guaranteed complete one.

Premium is not one thing.

• LinkedIn's plan comparison lists "Advanced search" only for Premium All-in-One, Sales Navigator Core and Recruiter Lite – not for Premium Career or Premium Business (LinkedIn Help).
• LinkedIn's own Premium Business sales page does mention "advanced search filters". The pages disagree, and the table above follows the Help comparison.
• Premium All-in-One offers "unlimited search with advanced filters" for "job function, seniority, location, headcount, and years of experience". It has no Sales Navigator interface, and LinkedIn is still testing it, so it "may not be available for purchase in your location" (LinkedIn Help).

The monthly allowance. A free account that searches a lot hits LinkedIn's commercial use limit. It resets "at midnight PST on the 1st of each calendar month". LinkedIn does not publish the number and cannot show how many searches you have left. Premium Business, Recruiter Lite and Sales Navigator raise it (LinkedIn Help). What counts, and what to do when you hit it, is covered in LinkedIn limits.

Recruiting plans have their own filter set – Recruiter Lite's 20 recruiting filters and Recruiter's 40+ are compared in AI candidate sourcing on LinkedIn. For what each Sales Navigator tier costs, see Sales Navigator pricing.

Sales Navigator search filters: the full list

LinkedIn markets Sales Navigator on "50+ filters" (LinkedIn). Its current definitions page lists 38 lead filters and 16 account filters, grouped like this (LinkedIn Help):

Lead filters

• Company: current company, past company, company headcount, company type, company headquarters location.
• Role: function, current job title, seniority level, past job title, years in current company, years in current position.
• Personal: geography (region or postal code), industry, first name, last name, profile language, years of experience, groups, school.
• Buyer intent: account has buyer intent, category interest, following your company, viewed your profile recently, viewed your Company Page recently.
• Best path in: connection (1st, 2nd, group, 3rd+, TeamLink), connections of, TeamLink connections of, past customer, past colleague, shared experiences.
• Recent updates: changed jobs in the last 90 days, posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days.
• Workflow: persona, account lists, lead lists, people in CRM, people you interacted with, saved leads and accounts.

Account filters

• Company attributes: annual revenue, company headcount, company headcount growth, headquarters location, industry, number of followers, department headcount, department headcount growth, Fortune.
• Spotlights: job opportunities, recent activities, connection, buyer intent.
• Workflow: companies in CRM, saved accounts, account lists.

Which tier unlocks what, in LinkedIn's words:

• Viewed your Company Page recently is "only available to Advanced and Advanced Plus users" (a1452817).
• Buyer intent "is available for Sales Navigator Advanced and Advanced Plus edition users only" (a507435), and so is Product Category Intent (a106027).
• Past customer is Advanced Plus only, and Executive TeamLink is Advanced and Advanced Plus (a106027).
• The TeamLink connections of filter and People in CRM are marked "(Advanced Plus Only)" on LinkedIn's filter comparison. The broader TeamLink feature – your team's connections as paths in – is on Advanced and Advanced Plus in the plan comparison.

In search, then, the step from Core to Advanced buys the buyer-intent filters and Executive TeamLink, and the step to Advanced Plus adds the CRM-linked ones – People in CRM and Past customer – plus TeamLink connections of.

Two filters you may see in older lists are gone. LinkedIn deprecated Posted Content and Became a Member, and folded the sales-intelligence filters into the Buyer intent, Best path in and Recent updates groups (a106027). "Technologies used" and "Mentioned in the news" also appear in some guides, but neither is on LinkedIn's current definitions page.

Boolean inside the filters

Boolean works in LinkedIn's search bar: AND, OR and NOT in uppercase, quotes for exact phrases, parentheses to group, and no wildcards (LinkedIn Help). In Sales Navigator it also works in the keyword, title and company fields, with a maximum of 15 operators per query (LinkedIn Help). Operators and copy-paste strings are in LinkedIn boolean search; searching LinkedIn profiles from Google instead is X-ray search.

Make a search repeatable

A search worth building is a search worth running again next week.

Inside LinkedIn

• On free and Premium accounts, re-run it from Recent searches, or keep the results URL.
• In Sales Navigator, save it.
  • You get "weekly emails and alerts on your Sales Navigator homepage when new people or companies match your search criteria".
  • You can keep 50 lead searches and 50 account searches.
  • Editing a saved search saves the changed criteria as a copy (LinkedIn Help).
  • Run a saved search again from Saved searches at the top of the Sales Navigator homepage (LinkedIn Help).

One behaviour to know before you trust a run: when a Sales Navigator lead search returns no results, it "might adjust a filter to show the closest matching leads" (LinkedIn Help). New names still deserve a glance against your criteria.

With a hosted tool. Several LinkedIn tools re-run saved searches for you:

• Expandi's auto-refresh re-runs a search every 24 hours or 7 days and adds new leads to the list;
• Evaboot's recurring exports repeat a Sales Navigator search, also from its MCP server, with only new leads in each run;
• PhantomBuster's Sales Navigator Search Export has a watcher mode for new profiles;
• Edges schedules people searches by URL, with an API.

These suit you when you want the tool to own the schedule. If you would rather keep the schedule, the list and the hand-off in your own stack – on any plan, standard search included – run it from code or an agent.

Re-run a saved search from code or an AI agent

Running a search you built in LinkedIn once, from its URL, is covered in LinkedIn boolean search. This section adds the recurring part: run the same search every week and keep only the people you have not seen before. Linked API runs the search on your own LinkedIn account and returns each person as JSON. Your code keeps the list of who it has already seen.

import { readFile, writeFile } from "node:fs/promises";
import LinkedApi from "@linkedapi/node";

const linkedapi = new LinkedApi({
  linkedApiToken: "your-linked-api-token",
  identificationToken: "your-identification-token",
});

const SAVED_SEARCH_URL =
  "https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?geoUrn=%5B%22103644278%22%5D&keywords=head%20of%20sales";
const SEEN_FILE = "seen-people.json";

async function loadSeen(): Promise<Set<string>> {
  try {
    return new Set(JSON.parse(await readFile(SEEN_FILE, "utf8")));
  } catch (error) {
    if ((error as NodeJS.ErrnoException).code === "ENOENT") {
      return new Set();
    }
    throw error;
  }
}

async function runSavedSearch(): Promise<void> {
  const seen = await loadSeen();
  const workflow = await linkedapi.searchPeople.execute({
    customSearchUrl: SAVED_SEARCH_URL,
    limit: 100,
  });
  const { data, errors } = await linkedapi.searchPeople.result(workflow.workflowId);
  if (errors.length > 0 || !data) {
    throw new Error(`Search failed: ${errors.map((error) => error.message).join("; ")}`);
  }

  for (const person of data) {
    const key = person.urn ?? person.publicUrl;
    if (seen.has(key)) {
      continue;
    }
    console.log(`${person.name} – ${person.headline} – ${person.publicUrl}`);
    seen.add(key);
  }
  await writeFile(SEEN_FILE, JSON.stringify([...seen], null, 2));
}

runSavedSearch().catch((error) => {
  console.error(error);
  process.exitCode = 1;
});

import json
from pathlib import Path

from linkedapi import LinkedApi, LinkedApiConfig, SearchPeopleParams

linkedapi = LinkedApi(
    LinkedApiConfig(
        linked_api_token="your-linked-api-token",
        identification_token="your-identification-token",
    )
)

SAVED_SEARCH_URL = "https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?geoUrn=%5B%22103644278%22%5D&keywords=head%20of%20sales"
SEEN_FILE = Path("seen-people.json")


def load_seen() -> set[str]:
    if not SEEN_FILE.exists():
        return set()
    return set(json.loads(SEEN_FILE.read_text()))


def run_saved_search() -> None:
    seen = load_seen()
    workflow = linkedapi.search_people.execute(
        SearchPeopleParams(custom_search_url=SAVED_SEARCH_URL, limit=100)
    )
    result = linkedapi.search_people.result(workflow.workflow_id)
    if result.errors or result.data is None:
        messages = "; ".join(error.message for error in result.errors)
        raise RuntimeError(f"Search failed: {messages}")

    for person in result.data:
        key = person.urn or person.public_url
        if not key or key in seen:
            continue
        print(f"{person.name} – {person.headline} – {person.public_url}")
        seen.add(key)
    SEEN_FILE.write_text(json.dumps(sorted(seen), indent=2))


run_saved_search()

How to read it:

• The first run is the baseline. It prints every current match as your starting list and records them all. Each later run prints only people who were not in an earlier run's results.
• "New" means not seen before, within what the search returned.
  • The search returns the first matches up to limit, so anyone beyond that slice is never seen.
  • A newly listed person may have matched for months and only now moved into the slice.
  • Keep the search narrow enough that its matches fit inside the limit and your plan's cap. LinkedIn shows a free account up to 250 results per search, whatever limit you ask for.
• A failed run changes nothing. If LinkedIn blocks the search or a filter cannot be applied, the code stops before it writes the seen list, so nobody is skipped next week.
• The key is the person's permanent urn. When LinkedIn hides it, the key falls back to the profile URL.
• Sales Navigator works the same way. Use nvSearchPeople with a Sales Navigator results URL, key each person by hashedUrl, and ask for up to 2,500 results. It needs a Sales Navigator subscription on the LinkedIn account and a Plus seat in Linked API (nv.searchPeople).
• The schedule is yours – cron, a CI schedule, n8n or Make.
  • A weekly run of one saved search is one search on your account.
  • It counts toward LinkedIn's limits like a search you run by hand.
  • It also counts toward the per-account search limit you set in Linked API (admin limits).

From the shell, the CLI does the same.

• linkedin person search takes typed filters (--position, --locations, --current-companies, --connection-degrees and more) but not a URL.
• A saved URL runs through linkedin workflow run, which prints the action's result under data.

set -euo pipefail

cat > weekly-search.json <<'EOF'
{
  "actionType": "st.searchPeople",
  "customSearchUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?geoUrn=%5B%22103644278%22%5D&keywords=head%20of%20sales",
  "limit": 100
}
EOF

touch seen.txt
linkedin workflow run --file weekly-search.json --json > run.json
jq -e '.data.success' run.json > /dev/null
jq -r '.data.data[].publicUrl' run.json | sort -u > current.txt
comm -13 seen.txt current.txt
sort -u seen.txt current.txt -o seen.txt

comm prints the profile URLs that were not in earlier runs, and the last line adds them to seen.txt. The shell version keys on the profile URL for readability. jq -e stops the script when the search itself failed, so a failed run is never mistaken for "nobody new".

With an AI agent.

• An agent with the MCP server or the agent-friendly CLI runs the same search from a plain ask. How an agent gets access to your account, and what else it can run there, is in the LinkedIn AI agent guide.
• Typed filters go through the search_people and nv_search_people tools.
• A saved URL goes through execute_custom_workflow in MCP or linkedin workflow run in the CLI, because search_people takes filters, not a URL.

An illustrative prompt:

Run my saved LinkedIn search at this URL through Linked API. Compare the people with seen-people.csv, list only the new ones with their headline and profile link, then add them to the file.

Who owns the schedule and the memory. Linked API runs the search and returns the results. The weekly job and the seen-before list live with your agent.

In Claude Code that job is a cloud scheduled task (formerly routines). Scheduled tasks are in research preview, on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans.

• A task runs on Anthropic's cloud from a fresh clone of its repository each time.
• So the seen list must be committed back to the branch the task starts from. Tell it to in the prompt, because by default it pushes to a claude/ branch.
• Or keep the list in a sheet or CRM the task reaches through a connector.

Setup is in Claude Code for LinkedIn marketing.

What to do with the new people once you have them – qualify, enrich, invite – is the workflow in AI sales prospecting on LinkedIn. People who change jobs are a signal of their own; see LinkedIn buying signals.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Build it in, or hand it to an agent

Build the weekly search into your own product, CRM sync or pipeline with the REST API, the Node and Python SDKs or the shell CLI. Or have an AI agent run it out of the box through the MCP server, the agent-friendly CLI or a ready-made skill – from a plain-language ask, on your own LinkedIn account. Plans are flat per seat, from $49/mo billed annually – see pricing.

Facts verified October 30, 2026 – LinkedIn Help and Sales Navigator plan pages, and the competitor features named here, checked on that date.