LinkedIn Banned Apollo and Seamless.ai – Now What?

Is this the death of LinkedIn automation?

LinkedIn banned Apollo and Seamless.AI, by blocking their access to the professional networking site.

Both Apollo & Seamless.AI had their LinkedIn Pages banned/deleted. This was first reported by Clark Barron:

Reddit’s Substack r/sales is already highly active about the topic.

Yesterday, Tim Zheng, the Founder & CEO of Apollo.io mentioned that they are working it out with LinkedIn.

“We are actively working with LinkedIn to understand the nature of our brand page restriction and to resolve the matter as soon as possible.”

Link to Original Post

What Happened?

We know very little about the situation, but it seems like:

• Apollo & Seamless have violated Terms of Service (TOS) of LinkedIn

• LinkedIn is targeting Sales Engagement Platforms (SEPs)

• Both platforms have browser extention scrappers

• Apollo’s Ads have stopped running on the Platform

According to LinkedIn’s help documentation, the platform explicitly prohibits “using automated software, devices, scripts robots, other means or processes to access, ‘scrape,’ ‘crawl’ or ‘spider’ the Services or any related data or information.”

These tools typically work by extracting contact information and other professional details from LinkedIn profiles to help sales teams build prospect databases.

LinkedIn has historically been protective of its user data, viewing unauthorized scraping as both a threat to user privacy and its own business model.

One explanation

LinkedIn wants to increase the revenue of their service focusing on the LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

This move reduces the capabilities of the most popular tools, and can boost sign-ups on the Sales Navigator.

*Of course, this is an assumption on my part, and we don’t really know what has happened yet.

The Impact on Sales Teams

Sales teams that have built their outreach strategies around these platforms might be impacted:

• Inability to verify contact information against LinkedIn profiles

• Loss of access to real-time updates on prospect job changes

• Disruption to automated prospect list building

The saving grace

Both platforms should have a big database already, so short term impact may be smaller if they don’t react fast to find a solution.

Who Else Might Be Impacted?

This creates short-term challenges for sales professionals, as well as the tools that rely on specific platforms. But, if LinkedIn is cracking on the top data scrapers violating their TOS, more platforms may be impacted like:

• RB2B

• ZoomInfo

• Lusha

• Clearbit

• Hunter.io

• Snov.io

• LeadIQ

The State of LinkedIn Automation

LinkedIn is currently full of spam by AI & automated messages.

The situation is worsening with the wider adoption of AI + Automation tools, and whether this is a move by LinkedIn to reduce spam or increase monetization, an aggressive move like this might mean more software companies will be impacted.

Already, it’s a mess to measure results in LinkedIn due to its restrictive API and scraping policies.