How to Export LinkedIn Search Results to CSV (2026)

LinkedIn does not let you export search results directly. A Chrome extension bridges that gap. Here is the fastest, cleanest way to get a search into a spreadsheet in 2026.

Step by step

1. Create a free Leadsforlinked account and install the Chrome extension. 2. Run any LinkedIn people search (free LinkedIn, Premium, or Sales Navigator all work). 3. Open the extension, pick a target audience and how many result pages to capture. 4. Export to CSV. The file is deduped with normalized names, ready for your CRM.

A search with hundreds of results doesn't need to be captured in one pass. Capturing in smaller batches, a page or two at a time, tends to produce cleaner data and lets you sanity-check the first export before committing credits to the rest of a large search.

Without Sales Navigator

You do not need Sales Navigator. Leadsforlinked works on the standard LinkedIn search bar, so you can skip the roughly 100 EUR per month Sales Nav cost. Use Boolean operators to tighten your search, or try the free Boolean search generator.

Why LinkedIn has no export button

This is deliberate. LinkedIn's value is the graph, and a native export would let anyone copy it wholesale, so no export exists on any plan, including Sales Navigator. What you get instead is a scrolling list you can read but not keep.

A browser extension closes the gap by reading the page you already have open, in your own session, at the pace a person would. Nothing hidden is unlocked: every profile in the export is one you could have opened and copied by hand. The extension just does it in one pass instead of four hundred.

Build the search before you export it

The quality of the export is decided before you click anything. A vague search produces a vague list, and no amount of cleaning afterwards fixes it.

Three rules cover most of it. Group job titles with OR rather than AND, because the same role is Head of Sales at one company and Sales Director at the next, and joining them with AND returns almost nobody. Put quotation marks around any phrase containing a space, or LinkedIn treats the words separately. And exclude aggressively: adding NOT with terms like intern, assistant, recruiter and freelance removes more noise than any amount of extra title-hunting adds.

If you would rather not write the string by hand, our free Sales Navigator URL Generator turns a list of job titles into a correctly bracketed Boolean string plus a ready-to-open search URL, and it works for standard LinkedIn search as well.

What actually ends up in the CSV

Every row carries the first name, last name, headline, job title, location and public profile URL. Names arrive split into separate columns and normalised, so you are not fixing capitalisation by hand, and the file is deduplicated before you download it.

What is not in there is an email address. This is LinkedIn profile data, not a contact database, and anything claiming to hand you verified emails from a LinkedIn search is either guessing at the format or matching against a separate database. If you need email addresses, our free Email Permutator generates the likely formats from a name and a company domain, though you should verify them before sending.

The limits worth knowing before you start

LinkedIn shows a maximum of 1,000 results per search, 100 pages of 10, regardless of how many people actually match. If your search returns more than that, the answer is not a bigger export, it is a narrower search: split by location, by seniority, or by company size and run several.

There is also a commercial use limit on standard LinkedIn accounts. Run a high volume of searches in a month and search is capped until the first of the following month. Premium or Sales Navigator lifts that cap. It restricts how much you can search, not what you can do with a list you have already built.

On the free Leadsforlinked plan, leads are released 20 at a time every hour. A 200-result search therefore arrives across several batches rather than all at once, and your remaining leads are held rather than lost. Paid plans lift the pacing entirely.

Common problems and what causes them

• Fewer results than the search showed. Usually duplicates being removed, or profiles that are out of network and display as LinkedIn Member. Those cannot be exported because there is no public profile behind them.
• Empty company fields. Not every profile lists a current employer in a structured way. The headline usually still contains it, which is why the headline is exported as its own column.
• The import stops partway. On the free plan this is the hourly batch, not an error. The panel shows a countdown and resumes where it stopped.
• Wrong people entirely. Almost always a Boolean problem, most often ANDing job titles that should have been ORed.

Beyond the export

A CSV is the start, not the finish. With Leadsforlinked you can skip the export entirely and load the same leads into a multi-step campaign, then track replies in the pipeline, so there is no re-import step. The export is always there when you need a file for another system.

Frequently asked questions