How Fresh Is the Data from Employee Listing Endpoint or the Search API?

Steven Goh -

Proxycurl's Employee Listing Endpoint and the Search API are powered by LinkDB. This means that searches are performed within LinkDB. We do not scrape LinkedIn for employee data or to perform people/company searches.

Since LinkDB is not synced with the latest data on LinkedIn, you might experience:

  1. Some profiles that match your query initially, but do not match upon refresh (with the Person Profile Endpoint using the use_cache=if-recent parameter).
  2. Some profiles that should be included but are otherwise excluded from our API results.

To understand this phenomenon, it's important to know that the results are only as good and fresh as LinkDB. Here's how we update LinkDB:

LinkDB is updated with every real-time (API) request to scrape a LinkedIn profile. Essentially, this methodology keeps data in LinkDB constantly updated, amounting to (up to) millions of profiles a day.

Furthermore, since the Proxycurl API only works with publicly accessible LinkedIn profiles, not all LinkedIn profiles are included within LinkDB.

As a result, popular profiles (like those of software engineers, CEOs, etc.) are often fresh on LinkDB. Less popular roles and people are updated less frequently. Profiles with their public profile visibility settings turned off, either fully or partially, will also be a poor match or not matched within the results you expect.

We do not scrape LinkedIn for employee data and searches for legal compliance reasons. This ensures that you can trust Proxycurl to build your application in a sustainable way.

Moreover, LinkedIn search results are limited to a maximum of 1000 results. This means that companies with more than 1000 employees will never be returned exhaustively.