Why Do Employee or Student Counts from our API Endpoint Differ from LinkedIn's Data?

1. Our Employee/Student Listing API endpoint relies on LinkDB, a database that exclusively gathers public LinkedIn profiles. Consequently, the data we can provide is only as comprehensive as the content available in LinkDB.
2. LinkedIn's specific heuristics for associating an individual with their employer are not transparent to us. In our system, a person is considered an employee if they explicitly link their LinkedIn company URL to their employer. However, there are cases where employees merely mention their employers by name. Consider, for example, PepsiCo Inc., whose LinkedIn page is linkedin.com/company/pepsico. If an employee identifies their employer as "PepsiCo" without including the specific URL, it's unclear whether LinkedIn would recognize this as valid employment.
3. The same rationale as mentioned in the second point applies to students associated with their educational institution.

In essence, the methods we use to classify employee/student listings are different from LinkedIn's, which results in slight deviations between our database and LinkedIn's. Nevertheless, the data we return is an accurate representation of employees, aligning with our heuristics, and is consistent with the employee growth charts on LinkedIn.