How to view someone’s LinkedIn profile without them knowing? (2023)

Do you want to view someone’s LinkedIn profile without them knowing that you have visited their profile?

Or do you want to reduce your visibility on the LinkedIn platform?

If so, this is the right guide to help you with the task.

In this guide, we will cover the following topics.

How to view someone’s LinkedIn profile without them knowing?

How to view the LinkedIn profile without signing up?

Is LinkedIn private mode really private?

These topics are discussed in detail below.

How to view someone’s LinkedIn profile without them knowing?

LinkedIn offers a private mode for its users. By browsing in private mode, it will become difficult for others to know that you have visited their profile.

This is because only limited information or no information about you will be shared with the member whose profile you have viewed.

So, others won’t be able to know about your existence.

Follow the below steps to make your LinkedIn account private.

Open the “Linkedin” app.

Click on the profile photo on the top of the page when you open it through your mobile phone.

Select “Settings” in the Linkedin App.

Select “Visibility”. 

You can now control the information you want to share with others.

Click on “Profile viewing options”.

Click on Private Mode.

Go back to the previous page.

You can now proceed with updating the visibility of your LinkedIn activity by turning off Story Viewing options, Edit your public profile, etc…

If you are accessing LinkedIn through a laptop or desktop, you can follow the below procedure to make your Linkedin account private.

Visit Linkedin.

When the profile opens, you can see the “Me” option near Notifications on the top of the screen.

Click on the “Me” option, and select “Settings & Privacy” from that. 

Select “Visibility”.

You can now control the information you want to share with others.

Click on “Profile viewing options”.

Click on Private Mode.

You can now proceed with updating the visibility of your LinkedIn activity by turning off Story Viewing options as well.

Now, if you view the profile of others it will get displayed as “Anonymous LinkedIn Member“.

How to view LinkedIn profile without signing up?

In the previous method, you need to sign up to view others’ profiles on LinkedIn.

Here, we will discuss two methods to view the LinkedIn profile without signing up.

This will also help you to view other’s profiles without them knowing.

1. Using Google Search Operators

2. Using Mobile-Friendly Test by Google

We will discuss each of these methods in detail below.

Use Google Search operators to view someone’s profile without them knowing

You can use various Google search operators to do a LinkedIn profile search without logging in.

Before you start using Google Search Operators, make sure that you open the browser in Incognito or private mode.

Assume, you want to find the details of a person named ‘John Doe’ without logging into Linkedin.

Then you can use a Google search with the following operator.

site:linkedin.com “John Doe“.

Here the operator “site:” limits results to those from a specific website. In this case, it is linkedin.com.

This operator returns all the pages with John Doe on LinkedIn.

You can narrow down the search results further by using the following operators as well.

site:linkedin.com intitle:John Doe

This search string returns pages with a profile name of “John” or “Doe” in the title on LinkedIn.

site:linkedin.com allintitle:John Doe

Similar to “intitle,” but only shows results containing all of the words John Doe in the title tag.

site:linkedin.com inurl:John Doe

This search operator return pages with John Doe in the URL. For this example, any results containing the word “John” or “Doe” in the URL will be returned.

site:linkedin.com allinurl:John Doe

This search operator return pages with John Doe in the URL. For this example, any results containing all of the words John Doe in the URL will be returned.

Select the profile you want from the search results.

Click on it.

Now, you can access the person’s profile anonymously.

The problem with this method is that you can access only limited information about the person.

However, the good thing is that the person won’t get to know that you have viewed their profile.

Use Mobile-Friendly Test by Google to view someone’s profile without them knowing

Follow the below steps to view others’ profiles anonymously using the Mobile-Friendly Test by Google.

Visit LinkedIn.

Click on the search bar at the top.

Enter the person’s name whose profile you want to view.

Now you can see the list of people.

Right-click on the concerned person and select “Copy link address“.

Visit the Mobile-Friendly Test page of Google.

Paste the copied URL into the search box of the website.

Click on the Test URL.

Then we land on another page and we can see a message Page is mobile-friendly.

Click on the VIEW TESTED PAGE.

Then a sidebox will appear.

Copy all the HTML code.

Open W3 school HTML editor.

Paste the HTML code on the left side.

Click on Run.

You can now see the LinkedIn profile of the person with all the relevant details on the right side.

Is LinkedIn private mode really private?

With LinkedIn private mode, the person whose profile you have viewed will get to know that an “Anonymous LinkedIn member” has viewed their profile.

So it is not really 100% private.

Also, we cannot see who has viewed our profile and it sometimes affects us badly in networking aspects.

So, to resolve this issue, Linkedin has introduced a new feature in their premium account, where you can remain private and you can also get to know about the people who viewed your profile.

FAQs

Wrapping Up

Viewing someone on LinkedIn anonymously is easy. We have discussed a few methods to do so here.

We hope this is useful for you.

Kindly let us know if you have further questions.

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