Free LinkedIn Profile Audit

What a LinkedIn Audit Can and Cannot Tell You

A profile fails for one of two reasons: nobody finds it, or people find it and are not persuaded. Those need different fixes. Findability is mostly a matter of which words appear in indexed fields — the headline, the About section, job titles and skills. Persuasion is a matter of evidence: whether the claims come with figures, and whether the headline is supported by anything underneath it.

This audit scores both, separately, and it shows you the arithmetic instead of a number. Every deduction below names its own point cost and its reason, which means you can overrule any of them. If you think a finding is wrong for your field, it probably is — a research scientist and a sales director should not have the same profile, and a tool reading text cannot tell which one you are unless you tell it.

How the sections are weighted, and why

• Headline — 25 points. It follows you into every search result, comment and connection request, and it is indexed. It is also the field most people never edit, which is why it usually holds the largest single available gain.
• About — 25 points. The only place you fully control the narrative. LinkedIn truncates it after roughly two lines on most screens, so the opening sentence carries far more weight than its length suggests.
• Experience — 25 points. Where a reader checks whether the headline is backed by anything. Indexed as well, so the wording works twice.
• Skills — 15 points. A structured, filterable field rather than free text. Cheap to fix, and disproportionately useful in recruiter filters.
• Consistency — 10 points. Whether the specialism your headline claims actually appears in the evidence, and whether the profile as a whole reads like the role you are targeting.

Those weights are an editorial judgement about how much of a recruiter's search and skim touches each field. They are not derived from a study, and no tool that gives you a LinkedIn score has access to LinkedIn's ranking. Treat the number as a way of prioritising your own editing time, which is what it is good for.

What each finding actually means

• "This is the headline LinkedIn writes for you." The default is your job title and employer. It only matches searches for that exact title at that exact company, which is almost nobody. Naming your specialism and tools multiplies the searches you appear in.
• "The opening line is generic." Only around 265 characters of your About section show before the "see more" cut. If those characters could describe anyone, the specific material behind the click is not being read.
• "Only X% of lines contain a number." A line without a figure describes a duty, and duties are identical across everyone with the same job title. Scale counts as evidence, not just growth — team size, budget, number of markets, volume handled.
• "Duty framing instead of achievement framing." "Responsible for" and "involved in" describe what you were given. A past-tense verb plus a result describes what you did with it.
• "Generic traits in your skills." Nobody runs a candidate search filtered on communication or teamwork, so those slots are inert. Named tools, methods and domains are what the filters use.
• "Your headline claims things the rest of the profile never mentions." A specialism stated once and never evidenced reads as aspirational. Either add the proof or drop the claim — both are legitimate fixes.

Why this does not connect to LinkedIn

Automated collection of LinkedIn profile data is against LinkedIn's terms of service, and tools that do it break whenever LinkedIn changes its markup. Asking you to paste four boxes is slightly more work for you and considerably more honest: nothing can be pulled from your account, nothing can be posted to it, and there is no access token in existence that could be misused later. If a profile tool asks you to log in with LinkedIn, ask what it is being given permission to do.

What happens to the text you paste

The audit runs on our server, in the request that submits your text. We state that plainly because it is what the code does — some tools in this suite score entirely in your browser and this one does not. Your text is not written to a database, no copy is kept once the response is sent, and there is no account for it to be attached to. If your About section contains something you would rather not send, take it out first; the audit only needs the wording.

Where to go after the audit

Fix the top-ranked items, re-run this to confirm the points returned, then keep the profile and your resume in agreement on the facts — titles, employers and dates — while letting them differ in voice. A resume is tailored and formal for one role; a profile is broader and written in the first person. Our free ATS checker handles the resume side, the job description decoder tells you which language a specific advert wants you to mirror, and the National Careers Service interview advice is a solid neutral reference for the stage after that.