Congrats! You’ve Reached Your Commercial Use Limit on LinkedIn Search

Congratulations! You are rocking it! If you’re approaching the commercial use limit on search, your activity indicates to LinkedIn that you are probably using it for prospecting or recruiting. LinkedIn is now limiting the free account holder’s search abilities based on the volume of search activity on a revolving monthly basis.

After you’ve reached the limit, you can continue to search, but you will see only a few results. This limit won’t affect your ability to search your 1st degree connections.

A progress bar appears on your search results screen when 30% of your searches are remaining, and it will continue to remind you in 5% increments. (The 1st of every month the count resets). Basically LinkedIn is telling you that it is time to upgrade to a Premium account plan that offer unlimited searching along with many other benefits:

• Business Plus
• Recruiter
• Sales Navigator

However, if you choose to stay as a free subscriber, LinkedIn has added a new feature only available to the Premium accounts before. You can now view the full names and profiles of everyone in you network (1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree). So, unless the search includes people not in your network at all, you will no longer be teased with Ted S. or Someone in the manufacturing industry when searching.

Here is a possible work around:

• Open 2 browsers – one that you are logged into LinkedIn and one logged out of LinkedIn and Google open.
• From your logged in account go create a search or open your saved search
• Copy and paste a name from the search into the Google search bar, click on their LinkedIn profile and view from their public profile.
• If you wish to communicate you then work out of your account. Let me know how it works!

Again, Congratulations, and although it sounds tongue and cheek, I mean it. I am thrilled that you are using LinkedIn enough to be inconvenienced by the new changes.