# LinkedIn Private Mode: What It Hides, and What It Costs You

LinkedIn private mode – what each viewing mode shows, what going private costs you on Basic and Premium, and how to turn it on or off.

LinkedIn private mode lets you decide what someone sees when you look at their profile: your full name, a vague description of your job, or nothing at all. The setting takes ten seconds to change, and almost nobody is told what it costs – because hiding yourself also hides them from you.

> **The short version.** LinkedIn gives you three profile viewing options: your name and headline, private profile characteristics such as job title and industry, or private mode. In private mode the person you viewed sees only "LinkedIn Member - This person is viewing profiles in private mode". The trade is reciprocal: on a free account, switching away from name and headline costs you your own list of who viewed you – and a free account only ever shows the three most recent viewers anyway. On Premium you can browse privately and still see the list of people who viewed you in the last 90 days. And no account, Premium included, can put a name to someone who viewed it in private mode.

## What LinkedIn's three profile viewing options actually show

The setting is called **Profile viewing options**, and per [LinkedIn Help](https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a567226/browsing-profiles-in-private-and-semi-private-mode) it has exactly three states.

| Option | What the profile owner sees | What you keep |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Your name and headline** | Your name, headline and photo, like any normal visit | Full access to your own viewer list, subject to your account tier |
| **Private profile characteristics** | "Profile characteristics such as job title, company, school, and industry" – for example, "Consultant at State Farm" | Nothing on a free account; the 90-day list on Premium |
| **Private mode** | "LinkedIn Member - This person is viewing profiles in private mode" | Nothing on a free account; the 90-day list on Premium |

The middle option is the one people misjudge. It feels anonymous because your name is gone, but it still tells a recruiter or a competitor which company and which role just looked at them – often enough to guess exactly who you are at a small company.

## What private mode costs you: the reciprocity rule

LinkedIn treats profile viewing as an exchange, and on a free account the exchange is strict: stop contributing your identity and it stops showing you other people's. Premium is the documented exception – the table below is the whole rule.

| | Free (Basic) account | Premium |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Browsing in private mode | Available | Available |
| Your own viewer list while private | **Lost** | **Kept – the last 90 days** |
| Viewer list when not private | Three most recent viewers in the last 90 days | Full list, and the dashboard reaches up to 365 days |
| Can you unmask a private viewer | No | No |

Two numbers here answer different questions, and they get merged constantly. **The 90 days is the private-mode guarantee:** LinkedIn states that with Premium you can browse privately "and still see the list of people who viewed your profile in the last 90 days", and that this "isn't possible with a Basic (free) account". **The 365 days is something else** – the general Premium viewer dashboard, which per [LinkedIn Help](https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a548046) offers a "Full list of viewers for up to 365 days" against a free account's "Three most recent viewers in the last 90 days". Private browsing does not extend to that longer window.

If your viewer list has gone empty and you do not know why, this is usually the reason. LinkedIn's own troubleshooting says it plainly: "If you don't see any profile viewers, check your Private Mode settings."

## Can anyone see who viewed your profile in private mode?

No – on any account type, including Premium.

Premium buys you the ability to browse privately without losing your own list. It does not buy you the ability to see through anyone else's private mode. [LinkedIn Help](https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a564182/private-mode-viewers-of-profiles) is explicit that even Premium subscribers cannot access the names of members who viewed them privately, and there is no setting, subscription or tool that reverses it. A private viewer appears in your list as an anonymous entry and stays that way.

What you can still tell is that *someone* came. A private visit is recorded – it is unattributable, not invisible. Keep the two hiding options apart here, because they are not equally hidden: a **fully private** visit shows "LinkedIn Member" and no identity information at all, while a **semi-private** visit still shows characteristics such as job title, company, school and industry. Both land in your list without a name, and [both look different in the data](#what-you-can-read-back-and-where-linkedin-draws-the-line).

## How to turn private mode on or off

The path, per [LinkedIn Help](https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a568195):

**On desktop**

1. Click the **Me** icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
2. Select **Settings & Privacy** from the dropdown.
3. Click **Visibility** on the left pane, and under **Visibility of your profile & network**, click **Profile viewing options**.
4. Choose one of the three options.

**On mobile**

1. Tap your profile photo, then tap **Settings**.
2. Tap the **Visibility** tab.
3. Tap **Profile viewing options**.
4. Choose one of the three options.

One thing worth knowing before you switch: LinkedIn's own troubleshooting for an empty viewer list points straight back here, telling members to set their profile viewing options to public to get viewer insights again.

## Private mode in Sales Navigator is a separate setting

If you use Sales Navigator, you have two independent controls, and changing one does nothing to the other. Sales Navigator has its own three viewing options, and [LinkedIn's Sales Navigator Help](https://www.linkedin.com/help/sales-navigator/answer/a105135) states it directly: "Changing your profile visibility in Sales Navigator will not change your profile visibility settings for LinkedIn.com."

A private view performed in Sales Navigator appears to the person you viewed the same way it does on LinkedIn.com – as an anonymous "LinkedIn Member" entry, per [Sales Navigator Help](https://www.linkedin.com/help/sales-navigator/answer/a567226). So a sales team that carefully set LinkedIn.com to show its name can still be browsing anonymously all day inside Sales Navigator without realising it, or the reverse.

## What private mode does not hide

Private mode governs one thing only: what others see **when you view them**. It is routinely confused with three separate controls.

- **It does not hide your profile.** Anyone who opens your profile still sees everything your public-profile settings allow. That is a different setting.
- **It does not hide you from search.** Recruiters searching LinkedIn, and search engines indexing your public profile, are unaffected.
- **It does not stop anyone from viewing you.** It only changes what you see about who did.

If your goal is to be less findable rather than less visible while browsing, private mode is the wrong lever entirely – the public profile settings are.

## Does viewing someone's profile notify them?

It depends, and the honest answer is less definite than most articles suggest. What is documented is that the view lands in the profile owner's "Who's viewed your profile" list, shown according to your viewing mode. A notification is a separate matter, and LinkedIn describes it as conditional rather than automatic: for the case it spells out – opening someone's mini profile from search suggestions – [LinkedIn Help](https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a568195) says the view "may result in a notification being sent to the member whose profile you viewed, **depending on your settings**".

So: the visit is logged either way. Treat the notification as possible, not certain, and note that your viewing mode also decides what such a notification could even say.

## When should you stay visible?

Being visible is what makes a profile visit usable as an introduction – a well-worn tactic, and not one we are claiming to have discovered. Someone sees your name in their viewer list, recognises it when your invitation arrives, and the request is no longer entirely cold. Recognition is possible; warmth and acceptance are not guaranteed, and any article that promises otherwise is selling something.

![What the other person ends up seeing in their Who's viewed your profile list. Browsing as yourself: the entry is shown with your name and headline, it may notify them depending on settings, and recognition is possible while acceptance is not. Browsing in private mode: the visit is still recorded but shows LinkedIn Member with no name, headline or photo attached, so they know someone came but not who](/images/guides/linkedin-private-mode-what-they-see.webp)

The trade-off is symmetrical, so choose by what you actually want:

- **Stay visible** when the visit is part of how you introduce yourself – business development, recruiting, networking before an event.
- **Go semi-private** when you want the role to register but not the person. Remember it can be enough to identify you at a small company.
- **Go fully private** when you are researching competitors, checking out a company before applying, or looking at anyone you would rather not signal to – and accept that on a free account you lose your own list for the duration.

**Where this meets automation.** A profile visit can be generated deliberately: [Linked API](/)'s [`st.openPersonPage`](/docs/action-st-open-person-page) exists precisely so that the visit lands as a real, visible one – it opens [the person's page](/docs/visiting-person-page) on LinkedIn itself, so it shows up in their viewer list exactly as a manual visit would, under whatever mode your account is set to. What no API can do – ours included – is change the mode that visit lands under. Profile viewing options are a manual account setting, so an account running visit-first sequences while set to private mode is doing the work and discarding the signal. Check the setting before you build the sequence, not after. You can drive those visits from your own backend with the [REST API, the Node and Python SDKs, or the CLI](/sdks), or have an AI agent run them out of the box through the [MCP server](/mcp), the agent-friendly [CLI](/cli), or a ready-made [skill](/skills). And keep the pace human: profile views have [their own daily ceilings](/guides/understanding-linkedin-limits#person-profile-view-limits), and visits are one touch in a [multi-touch sequence](/guides/linkedin-cold-outreach-strategies-2026), not a volume game. What you can do after the visit – message, invite, or neither – is decided by [the connection degree](/guides/linkedin-connection-degrees), which the visit itself does not change.

## What you can read back, and where LinkedIn draws the line

The viewer list is not just something you look at in the interface. [`st.retrieveProfileViewers`](/docs/action-st-retrieve-profile-viewers) reads your own profile viewers page and returns it as data – and what it returns is the clearest illustration of everything above, because **the API mirrors LinkedIn's disclosure exactly, viewer by viewer.**

Each entry comes back tagged with how much LinkedIn was willing to reveal:

| `viewerType` | What you get | What you do not |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **`identified`** | `name` and `publicUrl`, always. Then `headline`, `connectionDegree` and `avatarUrl` where LinkedIn showed them, and `urn` for part of the list only – each is `null` otherwise | – |
| **`anonymous`** | The verbatim `description` LinkedIn shows – "Business Strategist in the Computer and Network Security industry from Washington DC-Baltimore Area", or just "Someone at Example Company" – plus the `searchUrl` LinkedIn itself offers for those criteria | No name, no profile URL, no photo |

Both carry `viewedAgo` – a normalized relative age such as `6h`, `3d` or `2w` – and `viewedAt`, which is that relative age turned into a timestamp. Treat `viewedAt` as an **estimate**: `6h` means give or take an hour, `2mo` means give or take a month.

**`anonymous` is the API's bucket for every viewer LinkedIn did not identify, and it covers both hiding options at once** – so read it against the setting rather than through it. A semi-private viewer is the one whose row carries characteristics such as a job title, a company or an industry; a fully private viewer discloses no identity information at all. In both cases the action returns the description LinkedIn placed on that row and the group-search URL LinkedIn built from it, without inferring anything further: nothing in the API turns an `anonymous` row into an `identified` one. This is the concrete reason semi-private is the mode people misjudge – it is the one that leaves something behind.

Two limits worth knowing before you build on this:

- **LinkedIn decides how much history it shows you.** Without Premium it reveals only part of the list, and the action returns what is visible – fewer viewers than you asked for is a normal, successful result, not an error.
- **The description is returned as LinkedIn wrote it.** Linked API deliberately does not split that sentence into position, industry and location, because its wording differs by interface language and parsing it would produce quietly wrong values. The same criteria sit in machine-readable form in the query parameters of `searchUrl`.

For the trend rather than the list, [`st.retrievePerformance`](/docs/action-st-retrieve-performance) returns `profileViewsLast90Days` next to your follower count, post views and search appearances – see [retrieving SSI and performance](/docs/retrieving-ssi-and-performance) and the [SDK method](/sdks/retrieve-performance). It is an account-level total, so it answers "is interest growing" rather than "who came". LinkedIn only ever shows you a rolling window; a weekly job that appends that number to a row of its own turns it into a curve over months, and the [SSI guide's tracking section](/guides/linkedin-social-selling-index#track-your-ssi-over-time-the-part-worth-automating) already has that pattern written out.

What no API changes is the setting itself. Your profile viewing options stay a manual choice in your own account – Linked API can read who came and generate visits of its own, but it cannot decide how you appear when you go looking. Every action runs on your own account through a dedicated cloud browser at a human pace, on LinkedIn's own pages, and Linked API never stores your password.

## Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

#### Can someone see I viewed their LinkedIn profile if I'm in private mode?

No. They see an anonymous entry reading "LinkedIn Member - This person is viewing profiles in private mode", with no name, headline or photo. The visit is still recorded in their viewer list, so they know somebody came – they just cannot tell who.

#### Is LinkedIn private mode actually private?

For browsing, yes – your identity is genuinely withheld from the people you view, and no account tier can reverse that. But it is narrower than the name suggests: it does not hide your own profile, does not remove you from recruiter searches, and does not affect what search engines index. Those are controlled by your public profile settings.

#### What are the disadvantages of private mode on LinkedIn?

Two. On a free account you lose access to your own list of who viewed you for as long as you stay private. And any visit you make stops working as an introduction, because the person cannot see who you are – which matters if profile visits are part of how you reach people.

#### Does LinkedIn notify someone when you view their profile?

The view is recorded in their "Who's viewed your profile" list, shown according to your viewing mode. A notification is possible but not certain. LinkedIn documents that conditional wording for one specific case – opening someone's mini profile from search suggestions, which "may result in a notification being sent to the member whose profile you viewed, depending on your settings" – and does not publish a general rule for ordinary profile views. Do not count on a notification firing every time.

#### Can you see who viewed your profile in private mode with Premium?

Premium lets you browse in private mode and still see the people who viewed you in the last 90 days, which a free account cannot do. It does not let you identify anyone who viewed you privately – that is closed to every account type.

#### Can you get the list of who viewed your profile through an API?

Yes, for your own profile. Linked API's `st.retrieveProfileViewers` reads your profile viewers page and returns it as data, tagging each entry the way LinkedIn does. Identified viewers always arrive with a name and profile URL, plus a headline, connection degree, avatar and member URN where LinkedIn showed them. Viewers LinkedIn did not identify – whether they browsed semi-privately or fully privately – arrive tagged `anonymous`, carrying only the description LinkedIn itself placed on the row. It mirrors LinkedIn's disclosure rather than working around it, and how much history you get depends on your account tier.

#### Does private mode hide my profile from recruiters?

No. Recruiters can find and open your profile exactly as before. Private mode only changes what they see when *you* look at *them*. To change how findable you are, use your public profile visibility settings instead.

## Wrapping up

Private mode is a single switch with a symmetrical price: the anonymity you gain is paid for with the signal you send and, on a free account, with your own view of who is interested in you. Decide which side you need for the situation you are in, and remember it is a manual setting that no tool changes for you.

If profile visits are part of a workflow rather than something you do by hand, [Linked API](/) runs them on your own account through a cloud browser – build them into your own product with the [REST API, SDKs or CLI](/sdks), or hand the job to an AI agent through the [MCP server](/mcp), the [CLI](/cli), or a ready-made [skill](/skills). Flat per-seat [pricing](/pricing) from $49 a month, billed annually.

*Facts verified 18 August 2026 – LinkedIn viewing-mode, viewer-list and Sales Navigator behaviour checked against LinkedIn's own Help pages on that date.*