LinkedIn Banned Apollo and Seamless.ai – Now What?

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

Reddit’s Sales community is already worried about it, see the discussion here.

I first read about it from Clark Barron (suggested to follow for unapologetic marketing & news).

This development has sent ripples through the sales community, as many professionals rely on these tools to identify and connect with potential clients.

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.

What Happened

LinkedIn has implemented measures to prevent Apollo and SeamlessAI from accessing profile data due to violations of its Terms of Service. 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.”

LinkedIn also deleted their business pages from its platform as well as implemented bans on the platforms itself.

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.

As one sales professional noted on Reddit, “Seems like Seamless and Apollo are getting blocked by LinkedIn now. We’ve been using Seamless for a year or so now and all of a sudden our accounts are being flagged.”

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Impact on Sales Teams

The immediate consequence is disruption to established prospecting workflows. Sales teams that have built their outreach strategies around these platforms now face significant challenges:

• 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

What’s Next

Sales professionals are quickly pivoting to alternative approaches.

Some are returning to more manual prospecting methods while others are exploring compliant tools that access data through approved channels.

LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator remains a platform-sanctioned option, though it lacks some of the automation features that made Apollo and SeamlessAI attractive.

This enforcement action may signal a broader shift in the sales intelligence industry. We could see:

• Greater emphasis on first-party data collection
• More formal data partnerships between LinkedIn and third-party tools
• Development of new prospecting technologies that don’t rely on scraping (tough luck here)

For sales teams caught in this transition, the priority should be protecting their LinkedIn accounts while developing alternative prospecting strategies that respect platform rules.

Conclusion

While this enforcement creates short-term challenges for sales professionals, as well as the tools that rely on specific platforms.

While, a deal might be made or an alternative way to collect the data, for now we will expect some bumps into the road for anyone using these tools.

Other platforms that could be affected in the future might be:

• ZoomInfo
• Lusha
• Clearbit
• Hunter.io
• Snov.io
• LeadIQ