We’ve updated this article from March 2025 with the latest developments on lead gen providers using LinkedIn data.
LinkedIn is one of the best sources of data available for B2B sellers, but the Microsoft-owned platform is known for not making money by sharing its data. Instead, it generates revenue from advertising and premium subscription services, especially those for recruiters and sales professionals.
That hasn’t kept sales engagement platforms from using Chrome extensions to help sellers generate leads by grabbing data from LinkedIn. And that appears to be against LinkedIn’s terms of service prohibiting third-party tools from scraping LinkedIn data.
Sometime on March 6, 2025, a pair of sales engagement platforms — Apollo.io and Seamless.ai — disappeared from the LinkedIn platform. Both companies have Chrome extensions that salespeople use to take data from LinkedIn.
In the case of Apollo.io, the company still came up in LinkedIn search results after the news broke in March that it was removed from LinkedIn.
But clicking on that View Page button led to the message below. As of early May 2025, the company no longer comes up in LinkedIn search results (see the update below).
Apollo.io says it’s working with LinkedIn
In a statement sent to MarTech on Monday, March 10, 2025, Apollo.io said it is engaging with LinkedIn to find a resolution.
“We are actively working with LinkedIn to understand the nature of our brand page restriction and to resolve the matter as soon as possible,” said Tim Zheng, co-founder and CEO at Apollo.io.
Zheng’s statement also said Apollo’s removal from LinkedIn “does not disrupt Apollo’s services or impact our core platform functionality.”
Apollo.io said will issue updates on the situation via its Slack community.
G2’s coverage disappears from its website
One of the first websites to publish about the disappearance of Apollo and Seamless from LinkedIn was G2, which is more widely known for its software reviews than news coverage.
G2’s Sudipto Paul published an article on the situation, which was later edited and eventually removed from G2’s site sometime after March 7, 2025.
MarTech reached out to Jenny Gardynski, senior director of content and communication at G2, to ask about the article’s removal.
“An editorial decision was made to remove this particular piece,” Gardynski said via a LinkedIn message. “That said, our team at G2 will continue to cover trending topics in the software world and we hope to be a resource for you in the future!”
Both Seamless and Apollo posted early in 2025 about the recognition they garnered in G2’s 2025 Best Software Awards.
Meanwhile, Clark Barron, a well-known B2B marketing personality on LinkedIn, published a thorough analysis of the situation:
This wouldn’t be the first time LinkedIn took action against companies trying to get at its data. In 2022, a LinkedIn lawsuit led to the shutdown of Singapore-based company Mantheos Ptd. Ltd. LinkedIn lost a case against hiQ Labs, which is still making its way through the appeals process.
Are more lead gen providers being removed from LinkedIn?
Speculation that LinkedIn was broadly removing lead gen companies it believes violates its terms of service revved up in early May 2025, when Mustafa Saeed, co-founder and CEO of Luella.ai (which uses AI agents to help teams with deliverability and outreach) posted an email on LinkedIn naming several companies removed from LinkedIn for scraping the platform’s data.
The companies mentioned in Saeed’s post include LGM and Evaboot, in addition to Apollo and Seamless.
Evaboot markets itself as a LinkedIn scraping tool on its website.
None of the four companies mentioned in Saeed’s post come up in LinkedIn search results as of early May 2025.
In late April 2025, Apollo.io named Marcio Arnecke as its CMO and Adam Carr as its CRO. The company also redesigned its website and removed the mention of LinkedIn prospecting mentioned above.
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