Does LinkedIn Show Who Viewed Your Profile? Free vs Premium
Yes – LinkedIn shows you who viewed your profile, but how much it shows depends on your plan and on how you browse yourself. A free account gets a glimpse, Premium gets the list, and some viewers never get a name on any plan.
The short version. Your viewers live under Analytics → profile views on your own profile. A free account sees its three most recent viewers from the last 90 days – and only while it browses other profiles under its own name and headline. Premium Career and Premium Business show the full list, 90 days by default and extendable to 365, and keep the last 90 days even while you browse privately. On every plan, someone browsing semi-privately appears only as a description such as "Someone at Acme", and someone in private mode appears as "LinkedIn Member" – nobody can put a name to them.
For a one-off look, LinkedIn's own page is all you need, and the first three sections cover it. The rest is for people who sell or recruit and want the list as data they can act on.
Where to see who viewed your LinkedIn profile
Per LinkedIn Help:
- Desktop: click the Me icon at the top of your homepage, then View Profile, scroll to the Analytics section and click [Number] profile views.
- Mobile: tap your profile picture, tap it again to open your profile, scroll to Analytics and tap [Number] profile views.
The same page opens directly at linkedin.com/analytics/profile-views/. If nobody viewed you in the past 90 days, LinkedIn has nothing to show there.
What a free account shows, and what Premium adds
| Free (Basic) | Premium Career and Business | |
|---|---|---|
| Viewers you can see | The three most recent | The full list |
| How far back | 90 days | 90 days by default, extendable to 365 |
| Insights | Number of viewers, where they work, how they found you, job titles | All of that, plus filters by date, company and industry, and weekly trends |
| While you browse privately yourself | Nothing – the list is hidden | The last 90 days |
| Viewers in private mode | "LinkedIn Member", no name | "LinkedIn Member", no name |
Sources: LinkedIn Help on free versus Premium, Premium viewer insights and browsing in private mode. Those pages describe Premium Career and Premium Business; they say nothing about Sales Navigator or Recruiter, so neither does this table.
Without Premium, three is the whole allowance. There is no setting that shows a free account more, and the "last five viewers" figure you will still find repeated around the web is out of date – LinkedIn's own comparison now says three. The condition people miss is the fourth row: a free account that browses in private or semi-private mode loses its viewer list entirely until it switches back.
Why some viewers show up without a name
What you see of a viewer is decided by their setting, not yours. LinkedIn gives every member three profile viewing options:
| The viewer's setting | What appears in your list |
|---|---|
| Your name and headline | The viewer, with name, headline and photo |
| Private profile characteristics | A description only – job title, company, school or industry, such as "Someone at Acme" |
| Private mode | "LinkedIn Member – This person is viewing profiles in private mode" |
No plan unmasks the last two. LinkedIn is explicit that "even if you have a Premium account, you can't view the names of private mode viewers of your own profile" (LinkedIn Help), and no outside tool changes that.
Why isn't someone in my list? Usually one of four reasons:
- They browsed privately or semi-privately – they are in the list, just as "LinkedIn Member" or a description.
- You are on a free account and they are not among the three most recent – the fourth-most-recent viewer is already out of view.
- You browse privately yourself on a free account – then the whole list is hidden (LinkedIn Help).
- The view is older than your window – 90 days on free, 90 to 365 days on Premium depending on the date range you pick.
What going private costs you, plan by plan, is laid out in the private mode guide's reciprocity rule.
Will someone know you viewed their profile?
Yes, in the terms your own setting allows: your visit lands in their list as you, as a description, or as "LinkedIn Member", depending on the viewing option you chose. Whether they also get a notification, and how to turn private mode on or off, is covered in does viewing someone's profile notify them.
Turning profile viewers into warm leads
If you sell or recruit, a profile view is one of the few intent signals LinkedIn hands you directly: someone chose to look at you, usually after something you did – a post, a comment, an invitation, a visit of your own. That makes a viewer warmer than a cold search result. It does not make them a lead until you have checked they fit.
A routine that respects that:
- Check on a schedule. A free account shows only three viewers, so a daily look catches people a weekly one misses.
- Triage by fit first. Role, company and seniority decide whether a viewer is worth a message, not the view itself.
- Open with a reason that stands on its own. Reference what you have in common or what they may care about – not "I saw you viewed my profile".
- Check the connection degree before you write. It decides whether you can message someone or have to invite them first – see LinkedIn connection degrees.
- Treat "Someone at Acme" as an account signal. It names nobody, but it tells you a company you may be targeting just looked.
Visibility cuts both ways here: your own visits only work as an introduction when you browse as yourself – the private mode guide weighs that trade.
Get your profile viewers as data with Linked API
Checking the page by hand stops scaling once viewers are a pipeline input. Linked API reads your own profile viewers page for you, so an AI agent connected through the MCP server or the agent-friendly CLI can hand you the list on request:
Used Linked API: retrieve_profile_viewers
- 11 viewers in the last 7 days: 8 named, 3 semi-private
Here are your viewers from the last 7 days, newest first. Four of the eleven:
| Viewer | What LinkedIn showed | Degree | Viewed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dana R. | VP Sales at a B2B software company | 2nd | about 4h ago |
| Kim T. | Head of Revenue Operations | 1st | about 1d ago |
| Ben O. | Founder, design studio | 3rd | about 2d ago |
| Semi-private | "Someone at Northwind" | – | about 3d ago |
Each viewer comes back tagged with how much LinkedIn revealed:
| Viewer type | What you get | What you never get |
|---|---|---|
| Identified | Name and profile URL, always; headline, connection degree and photo where LinkedIn showed them | – |
| Anonymous (semi-private) | The description LinkedIn showed, verbatim – "Someone at Example Company" – and the people search LinkedIn itself offers for those criteria | A name, a profile URL, a photo |
The limits, stated plainly, because they are LinkedIn's limits and no API removes them:
- Your own profile only. It reads the viewers page of the account it runs on.
- Only what your plan shows. Without Premium, LinkedIn shows part of the list, and getting fewer viewers than you asked for is a normal, successful result – not an error.
- Viewers in full private mode are not returned at all. They disclose nothing, so there is nothing to return; anonymous rows are the semi-private ones.
- No row is ever turned into a name that LinkedIn withheld.
- The view time is an estimate, worked back from the relative age LinkedIn displays – "6h" is give or take an hour, "2mo" give or take a month.
For developers, the same list is st.retrieveProfileViewers, where each row carries viewerType – identified or anonymous – and the SDK reference has the full response contract. From the terminal it is one command: linkedin stats viewers --limit 50 --json with the Linked API CLI.
For the trend rather than the names, ask for your account performance: profile views over the last 90 days, next to your follower count and post views (retrievePerformance in the SDK, retrieve_performance for an agent). It is an account-level total that answers "is interest growing" rather than "who came"; appending it to a sheet weekly turns LinkedIn's rolling window into a curve, the same pattern the SSI guide uses.
From a viewer to a conversation
The list becomes useful when it feeds the next action: invite the identified viewers who fit, and tally the semi-private ones by company. Give the agent your fit rules and a list of people you have already handled, and ask each morning:
Used Linked API: retrieve_profile_viewers, fetch_person, fetch_company, check_connection_status
- 9 viewers in the last 2 days: 6 named, 3 semi-private
- handled.csv matched; 1 viewer skipped as already handled
- current title, company and recent posts
- industry and headcount on LinkedIn
- relationship state for the viewers who fit
2 of 5 named viewers fit, and 2 of the 3 semi-private views came from Northwind. Nothing has been sent.
| Viewer | Fit | Where you stand | Next step |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dana R. – VP Sales, 120-person software company | Fits | Not connected | Draft note: "Hi Dana – your post on ramping new SDRs faster was useful. Would be glad to connect." |
| Kim T. – Head of RevOps, 300-person software company | Fits | Connected | Message instead of an invitation |
| Ben O. – Founder, design studio | No fit | – | Skip |
| "Someone at Northwind" ×2 | Account signal | – | Flag Northwind; LinkedIn named no one |
the agent waits for your go-ahead before sending any invitation
What to keep in mind:
- Keep your own list of who you have handled. View times are estimates and recent views show in hours or days, so ask with a little overlap – two days back for a daily check – and let the handled list drop repeats. That gives you "new viewers since last time", not a count of visits.
- Semi-private viewers have no identity. Two checks cannot tell whether "Someone at Acme" is one person twice or two people, so the company tally is a rough signal, never a precise count.
- A semi-private viewer can still lead somewhere. LinkedIn attaches its own people search for the criteria it disclosed. Hand it to the agent – the MCP
search_peopletool takes it ascustomSearchUrl, the CLI aslinkedin person search --url, and code passes it tosearchPeople– and you get people who match what LinkedIn disclosed: a candidate list, not the viewer. - Keep the pace human. Invitations and profile views have their own daily ceilings, and a viewer is one touch in a multi-touch sequence, not a volume game. More on invitations in automating connection requests.
Developers can build the same routine into a backend or CRM with the REST API, the Node and Python SDKs or the CLI. Read the company from the semi-private row's searchUrl parameters rather than its description, whose wording changes with the account's interface language, and send approved invitations with sendConnectionRequest. Either way it 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)
On a free account, 90 days. On Premium Career and Premium Business the list covers 90 days by default and can be extended to 365; while you browse privately, Premium keeps the last 90 days.
Most often because you browse in private or semi-private mode on a free account, which hides your own list. Otherwise nobody viewed you in the last 90 days, or the people who did browsed privately and appear only as "LinkedIn Member" or a description.
Yes, in whatever form your viewing option allows: as yourself, as a description of your role and company, or as "LinkedIn Member" in private mode. You choose that setting yourself – see LinkedIn private mode.
Yes, for your own profile: Linked API's st.retrieveProfileViewers returns the list LinkedIn shows your account, as identified viewers with a name and profile URL, and semi-private viewers as the description LinkedIn displayed. It never names a private viewer, does not return fully private visits, and returns only as much history as your plan shows.
Wrapping up
LinkedIn shows you who viewed your profile within firm limits: three viewers on a free account, the full list on Premium, and no names for anyone who browses privately. For a quick look, open your profile's Analytics. To act on viewers every day, let an AI agent pull the list through the MCP server – or get an API key and build it into your own workflow.