To find similar LinkedIn profiles, use LinkedIn’s Similar Profiles suggestions, filtered search, or an AI lookalike tool seeded with one profile. Three methods, three price tags, three very different ceilings. I’ve leaned on all of them. Back in 2022, I supported a 20-rep sales team and spent Friday afternoons clicking through 40-plus profiles, chasing copies of one perfect buyer. There’s a better way to run that hunt. Let’s get into it.
📌 TL;DR: Free: open a model profile and work LinkedIn's similar-profile suggestions plus filtered search. Recruiting: LinkedIn Recruiter's Find Similar Profiles turns one candidate into a match list. Scale: seed a contact lookalike tool with one LinkedIn URL or work email and get the 25 most similar people, ranked and exportable.
What Is LinkedIn’s Similar Profiles Feature?
Similar Profiles is LinkedIn’s built-in box of members who resemble the profile you’re viewing. LinkedIn’s help center describes it as a way to find profiles that match on real career signals:
“Similar profiles” suggestions are generated using a proprietary algorithm and designed to help you find profiles with similar experience, job function, and more.
LinkedIn Help, Finding Similar Profiles
You’ll usually spot the suggestions around a member’s profile page. But here’s the catch I learned in 2022: LinkedIn tunes and moves these boxes constantly. One product test, and my whole Friday routine lost its trail. So treat the box as a lead, not a system, especially if prospecting is your job and not your hobby.
And what about “People also viewed”? That older sidebar box showed profiles that other visitors browsed in the same sessions. People mostly Google it for privacy reasons (“why am I listed there?”), which tells you something. LinkedIn has been phasing it out in favor of a “Your viewers also viewed” module, a shift covered well by Lindsey Gamble’s report. One thing matters for us: co-viewing is browsing correlation. It is NOT similarity matching. Two profiles get co-viewed because they’re both interesting, not because they’re alike.
🔍 Did You Know?: LinkedIn is replacing the classic "People also viewed" box with "Your viewers also viewed," per LinkedIn's own help pages. If your workflow depended on that sidebar, it's already living on borrowed time.
How Do You Find Similar Profiles on LinkedIn by Hand?
Open a model profile, scan its similar-profile suggestions, then mirror its keywords in filtered searches. That’s the whole free toolkit. And honestly? It works fine at small scale. Recruiters use it to widen a candidate pool. Sellers use it to find more people like a proven buyer. Same mechanics either way, so here’s how I run each half when I want to find similar profiles on LinkedIn without spending a cent.
Start from a profile you admire
Pick the person you wish you could duplicate: your best buyer, your dream candidate, that one customer who “gets it.” Open their profile. Check the suggestion box, and follow the chain two or three hops deep, noting names as you go. Free, zero setup, surprisingly decent. But you inherit LinkedIn’s guesses about what “similar” means. There’s no export button, no ranking you control, and the chain goes stale the moment the algorithm updates.
Rebuild the profile as a filtered search
Next, make the seed profile a search query. Take its exact job title, its skills, its industry words, and feed them into the LinkedIn search bar with title, company, and location filters. LinkedIn’s people-search documentation covers the filter mechanics. This is a repeatable similar profiles search you control, and it’s how I found half my 2022 list. The cost is time: two to three minutes per prospect once you include the profile check. Both free methods really are free. You just pay in Friday afternoons. And keep notes as you go, because a search you can’t reproduce next week isn’t a process, it’s luck.
💡 Pro Tip: Keep the seed profile open in one tab and copy its EXACT headline nouns into the search bar. Search for their words, not your assumptions. "RevOps lead" and "Revenue Operations Manager" live in different search results.
How Does “Find Similar Profiles” Work in LinkedIn Recruiter?
Recruiter turns one candidate profile into a searchable list of members with similar skills, experience, and titles. According to LinkedIn’s Recruiter documentation, you start from a candidate’s profile inside Recruiter and use Find Similar Profiles to generate the matches. For hiring teams, it’s the strongest built-in option by far.
The honest limits? Three. You need a paid Recruiter seat. The workflow is built for hiring, so sellers get little from it. And your candidates stay inside LinkedIn’s walls until you message them there.
Still, it shines in its lane. In 2023, a recruiter friend of mine back in Hamburg lost her one perfect candidate to a counteroffer. Brutal Tuesday. But she seeded Find Similar Profiles with that declined candidate and rebuilt her entire shortlist the same afternoon. The seed didn’t take the job. The seed’s twins did.
For Sales: Turn One Great Buyer Into a Prospect List
Now for the half nobody writes about. Sellers need similar profiles more than anyone, and they’re the least served. Because most reps don’t have Recruiter seats. And the sidebar suggestions optimize for browsing, not for your ideal customer profile. When you find one buyer who matches your buyer persona in the wild, you want 25 more of them, not a browsing session. That’s the core move in lookalike prospecting, and it usually starts right after you find decision makers on LinkedIn and watch one of them turn into a real deal.
Here’s how I scale that moment with CUFinder’s Contact Lookalike Finder:
- Seed it with ONE person, by LinkedIn URL or by work email. The email option matters: sometimes a signature is all you have.
- The AI builds a 360-degree profile from that person’s posts, reactions, and activity, plus their company’s, and returns the 25 most similar contacts. It’s an independent model over its own contact data, not a scrape of the “People also viewed” box.
- Going bulk? Upload an Excel or CSV file with a LinkedIn-URL or email column and run every seed at once.
- Export to Excel, save the results as a list, or push them to HubSpot, Salesforce, or Zoho.
- Credits only spend on successful matches; “Not Found” rows are free.
My working funnel from one champion: → 1 profile → 25 similar contacts → 8 true ICP fits → outreach. And be honest with yourself at step three. The 25 are candidates, not a finished pipeline; qualification stays your job. Then comes B2B data enrichment for the keepers, starting with verified work emails from LinkedIn profiles, so your first touch doesn’t bounce.
For Recruiting: Rebuild a Shortlist From Your Best Candidate
Recruiters run the same play with a different seed. Your best source material is the candidate who aced every interview, or the top performer already sitting in the role. If you have a Recruiter seat, Find Similar Profiles is the native fit for sourcing inside LinkedIn, and I’d start there. But when you want a ranked list you can export, score, and work outside LinkedIn (say, for a talent-mapping sheet or an agency handoff), seed a lookalike tool with that one profile URL instead. It’s the same champion-cloning logic sellers use; I break the full workflow down in how to clone your best customers, and it maps one-to-one onto cloning your best hire.
🧠 Fun Fact: LinkedIn says its similar-profile matching compares experience, job function, and skills. So tidy seed profiles produce tidier matches. A seed with a vague headline gives every algorithm less to work with, LinkedIn's included.
What Are the Limits of LinkedIn’s Similar Profiles?
The built-in suggestions are unranked, capped, non-exportable, and tuned for browsing rather than your ICP. That’s four separate ceilings:
- No export, no CRM path. Names live in the sidebar until you copy them by hand.
- No control over the signals. You can’t tell LinkedIn what “similar” should mean for your business.
- Features move. Boxes get tested, replaced, or retired, as the “People also viewed” phase-out shows.
- One-at-a-time browsing. Fine for a dozen prospects. Painful at a hundred.
| Built-in suggestions | Recruiter | Lookalike tool | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Paid seat | Credits per match |
| Scale | A few at a time | Shortlists | 25 per seed, bulk files |
| Export | None | Recruiter projects | Excel, lists, CRM push |
| Control | LinkedIn decides | Some filters | You pick every seed |
So which method wins? Match it to your week. If you need three names for one deal, the free boxes are plenty. If you’re hiring and you live in Recruiter, stay native. But the moment your similar profiles search becomes a weekly habit with a quota behind it, you want seeds, ranking, and an export path. Volume changes the tool, not the idea.
Two boundary notes before the FAQ. First, similar profiles are PEOPLE. If what you actually need is similar companies (more agencies like your best client, for instance), that’s a different job with different tools; my guide on how to find similar companies covers that company-level lookalike search. Second, whenever you export or enrich people data, keep legitimate-interest rules in view. GDPR.eu explains the ground rules in plain language.
FAQ: Similar LinkedIn Profiles
How can I find similar LinkedIn profiles?
Use LinkedIn’s similar-profile suggestions, rebuild the seed as a filtered search, or seed a lookalike tool with one profile. The first is free browsing, the second is free but manual, and the third returns 25 ranked matches you can export.
What is the 3/2/1 rule on LinkedIn?
It’s a community pacing heuristic, not an official LinkedIn rule. One popular version: three industry posts, two personal-insight posts, and one promotional post per week. Variants abound. Treat it as a posting rhythm, and adjust to whatever your audience actually responds to.
How can I see what my LinkedIn profile looks like to other people?
Check your public-profile settings, where LinkedIn shows how your profile appears to non-connections and lets you toggle what’s visible. Reviewing it occasionally is worth it, because your headline is what similar-profile boxes and recruiters see first.
How do I know if someone searched me on LinkedIn?
You can’t see searches. LinkedIn shows profile VIEWS, with detail depending on your plan and both sides’ privacy settings, plus weekly search-appearance counts. Nobody gets a list of who typed their name into the search bar.
How do I remove “People also viewed” from my LinkedIn profile?
Look in your profile visibility settings for the option controlling that module. LinkedIn has historically offered a toggle, and the feature itself is being phased into “Your viewers also viewed.” Either way, the box reflects browsing patterns, not anything you did wrong.
Can ChatGPT analyze LinkedIn profiles?
Only text you paste into it. ChatGPT can summarize a profile or draft outreach from it, but it can’t browse LinkedIn for you, follow suggestion chains, or build compliant contact lists at scale. Pair it with a real data workflow instead.
Is there a free way to find similar profiles?
Yes: the suggestion boxes and filtered search cost nothing. Your real cost is time, at roughly two to three minutes per prospect. Paid tools exist for the parts free methods can’t do: ranking, bulk runs, and export.
Can someone see if I search or view their LinkedIn profile?
By default, yes: LinkedIn shows profile views unless you switch to private mode in Settings, under Visibility. In private mode you browse anonymously, but you also lose the ability to see who viewed you. For quiet research at scale, tools that work from a seed profile avoid the problem entirely.
Which AI tools can read a LinkedIn profile?
ChatGPT and most chatbots can’t open LinkedIn directly, since profiles sit behind a login. Purpose-built tools like CUFinder’s Contact Lookalike Finder work differently: they build a profile from a person’s public activity and their company’s, without you scraping anything yourself.
It’s Time to Stop Losing the Trail in the Sidebar
I spent a year of Fridays clicking through profile chains that evaporated whenever LinkedIn shipped a test. You don’t have to.
Start with the free methods today. Seriously, they’re good. Then, when one buyer or one candidate proves the pattern, scale that person instead of your search filters. Because the fastest way to find similar LinkedIn profiles isn’t a smarter search string. It’s a better seed. Picture it: one URL pasted in, and a ranked list of 25 comes back before your coffee cools.
So tell me in the comments: which profile would you clone first, your best buyer or your best hire? I read every answer, and I’ll trade you my seed-picking checklist.
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