How to Get Contact Info From LinkedIn Without a Connection (API Method)

TL;DR

• You do not need a connection. A public linkedin.com/in/... URL goes into GET /v2/people/email/work and GET /v2/people/phone, and you read the answer from the response.
• It takes about 10 minutes the first time, mostly getting a key. One profile spends 1 to 2 of your 1,000 free records, found or not.
• The result carries a status. Filter on it before you send, because bounced emails are not refunded.

Prerequisites

• A LeadOcean account and key from app.leadocean.io. The free plan has no card and 1,000 records, one-off.
• The key in your shell as $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY. Free keys get the search and enrich scopes.
• curl and jq. For the list step, a text file with one profile URL per line.

export LEADOCEAN_API_KEY="paste-your-key-here"

Step 1: Check what the profile shows by hand

Open the profile and click Contact info. It costs nothing and takes a minute.

You see only what the person chose to show. Many profiles show no email and no phone, and what is there may be stale. This step does not scale past a handful of people, which is why the rest of this guide uses an API.

Before you send a URL anywhere, strip the tracking parameters that share links add.

echo "https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe-123abc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop" \
  | sed -E 's/\?.*$//'

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe-123abc/

Step 2: Get the work email

Send the cleaned URL to the work email endpoint. It returns one address at the person's current employer, or data: null.

curl -s -G "https://api.leadocean.io/v2/people/email/work" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "linkedin_url=https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe-123abc/" | jq

The endpoint returns only addresses with status verified, catch_all_valid or catch_all. So null means none that qualify, not that the person has no email.

The call costs 1 record whether it finds an address or not. Nothing is sent to the person and no connection request is made. You are querying a dataset, not LinkedIn.

Step 3: Get the phone number

Phone numbers come from a separate endpoint, so you pay for them only when you want them.

curl -s -G "https://api.leadocean.io/v2/people/phone" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "linkedin_url=https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe-123abc/" | jq

Like the email call, this costs 1 record per call, including a call that finds nothing. Run the email call first and the phone call only for the profiles you plan to dial.

If you want the full record in one request instead, use enrich. It takes exactly one of linkedin_url, email, phone or person_id. A person we hold nothing for is a 404 and costs nothing.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe-123abc/",
    "reveal_email": true
  }' | jq '.data.contact_data'

reveal_email adds no extra record. The same response includes career history under resume_data (past roles, education, certifications), when we hold it.

Step 4: Run it over a list

Put one URL per line in profiles.txt. Loop the work email call and write one JSON line per profile.

while IFS= read -r url; do
  clean=$(echo "$url" | sed -E 's/\?.*$//')
  curl -s -G "https://api.leadocean.io/v2/people/email/work" \
    -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
    --data-urlencode "linkedin_url=$clean" \
  | jq -c --arg url "$clean" '{url: $url, email: .data.email, status: .data.status}'
  sleep 0.25
done < profiles.txt > results.jsonl

The sleep 0.25 keeps you under the Free limit of 5 requests a second. On Agency, at 200 requests a second, drop it.

Records add up on a loop. 500 profiles spend 500 records, hits and misses alike. Run 20 first and read the hit rate before you run the rest.

Step 5: Filter on status before you send

An address is not a send list until you have read its status. Keep verified and catch_all_valid. Treat catch_all as a risk you size.

jq -c 'select(.email != null and (.status == "verified" or .status == "catch_all_valid"))' \
  results.jsonl > sendable.jsonl
wc -l sendable.jsonl

The dataset is refreshed monthly, and each record carries its own fetched_at date. If a list is older than a month, look the profiles up again.

If you have no URLs yet, skip LinkedIn entirely. Search by domain with GET /v1/companies/{domain}/people, then enrich by person_id. For a filtered audience, POST /v1/exports writes up to 50,000 rows a request and 500,000 a day. Bulk CSV export is not on Free.

What you get

Response shape from the API reference, with placeholder values. The work email call returns success and data, with no meta object.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "email": "jane.doe@acme.com",
    "status": "verified",
    "verified_batch_date": "2026-09-20"
  }
}

The enrich call returns contact points under data.contact_data. Phones come back as contact_phones[].phone.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "contact_data": {
      "has_email": true,
      "has_phone": true,
      "email_status": "verified",
      "contact_emails": [
        { "email": "jane.doe@acme.com", "type": "work", "status": "verified" }
      ],
      "contact_phones": [
        { "phone": "+14155550133", "type": "mobile" }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Troubleshooting

FAQ