LinkedIn Profile ID Finder

Instructions

1. Paste a LinkedIn profile URL into the field above — the usual linkedin.com/in/some-name shape.
2. Click Run.
3. The numeric profile ID comes back as JSON: { "profileId": "123456789" }.

What the profile ID is

Every LinkedIn profile has a public vanity slug — the some-name in linkedin.com/in/some-name — and, underneath it, a numeric entity ID. The slug is what people share; the number is what LinkedIn's own systems use to refer to the account.

The two behave very differently. A member can change their vanity slug whenever they like, and the old one is then free for someone else to claim. The numeric ID never changes. If you're storing a reference to a person across time — in a CRM, a dataset, an integration — the slug is a name and the number is an identity. Only one of them is safe to key on.

How it works

The tool fetches the page at the URL you give it and looks for an entity_id value embedded in the returned HTML. If it finds one, that's your profile ID. There's no LinkedIn API involved and no authentication — it reads the page exactly the way an anonymous visitor would.

Worth knowing: the URL isn't checked against linkedin.com. Any well-formed public URL is fetched and scanned for the same entity_id pattern. This is intentional — it's the behavior of the original tool, kept as-is — but it means the tool is really "find an embedded entity_id", and LinkedIn profiles are just where that pattern usually appears.

Notes and limits

• LinkedIn gates most profile pages from logged-out visitors. This is the main reason a lookup fails. The fetch is anonymous, so if LinkedIn serves an auth wall instead of the profile, there is no entity_id in the response and you'll get "Could not find a profile ID on that page." That is a statement about what LinkedIn returned, not about whether the profile exists.
• It reads the initial HTML response, not the page after JavaScript runs. Anything injected client-side is invisible to it.
• Nothing is stored. The URL is fetched, scanned, and discarded.

FAQ

Why do I get "Could not find a profile ID on that page"?

Almost always because LinkedIn served a login wall rather than the profile. Anonymous access to profiles is inconsistent — it varies by profile, region, and how aggressively LinkedIn is gating at that moment. The tool reports what came back; it can't authenticate its way past that.

Is the profile ID the same as the URN?

They're related but not interchangeable. The numeric entity ID is the bare number. A URN wraps an identifier in LinkedIn's namespaced form (urn:li:...). If you're after the URN behind a post rather than a profile, use the LinkedIn Post URN Extractor.

Can I look up a profile by name instead of URL?

No. The tool needs a URL to fetch — it has no search index and no way to resolve a name to a profile.

Analyze a whole profile, not one post

These extractors decode one URL at a time. If what you actually want is to understand a whole profile — your own, a peer's, or a competitor's — I built Flux for exactly that: paste any public LinkedIn profile URL and get its full post history analyzed (engagement trends, top posts, formats, posting times), with no login and no Chrome extension, from $3/month. It's the automated version of the spreadsheet workflow these free tools were built to feed.