A plain LinkedIn search, out as a spreadsheet
Run a people search on LinkedIn, start Cuvy on the results page, and it reads the rows in front of it: name, title, company, and a work email it finds and checks for each person. The file comes out as a CSV. Sales Navigator is not required — a plain search and the free plan are enough to try it.
- Sales Navigator
- Not required
- Free plan
- 50 addresses a month
- Rows with no name
- Skipped, not charged
- Comes out as
- A CSV
50 addresses free every month · no card
A people search is a smaller room than a lead search
Fewer filters, shorter pages, and a limit you meet sooner. None of that stops a run — it changes how big one is.
The search here is the one behind the box at the top of LinkedIn, with the People tab selected. It filters on what a normal account can filter on: keywords, location, current company, industry, connection degree. It pages in short screens and it stops going deeper well before a lead search would. A run started from it is tens of people, sometimes a few hundred, rather than the thousands a lead search produces in one pass.
That difference sits in the search, not in the extension. Nothing about Cuvy needs a Sales Navigator seat, and the free plan covers profile and search lookups on LinkedIn itself, which is precisely this. So the sensible order is to run one search here, look at what comes back, and then decide whether LinkedIn filters you cannot reach are worth a subscription — rather than buying the seat to find out.
One thing to know before you start. A free LinkedIn account can only run so many searches in a month, a cap LinkedIn calls the commercial use limit. It applies to your account and your browsing rather than to the extension, and nothing installed in a browser can lift it. Meeting it is LinkedIn telling you to slow down or to pay it.
Three steps from a results page to a file
- People results only
Put the People tab on the search
A run reads a page of people, so the People filter has to be the one selected. Company results and post results have nobody on them to look up.
- Priced before it runs
Start Cuvy on the results page
It counts the rows it can actually work from, skips the ones with no name attached, and shows what the run would cost before it spends anything.
- CSV or HubSpot
Take the spreadsheet
Names, titles and companies as the page shows them, with a checked work address beside each person and a note of where it was seen. A CSV, or straight into HubSpot.
Three things a plain search does that a lead search does not
Worth reading before the first run, because two of them explain a file that looks shorter than you expected.
- A short page at a time
- A people search renders a handful of rows per screen and will not page on for ever. Expect to cover an ICP with several narrow searches where a lead search would have taken one wide one.
- Rows with nobody on them
- Out of network, LinkedIn withholds the name and the profile link, so some rows arrive as a job title and a company with no person attached. Nothing to look up means nothing to charge for. They still appear in the file, which is why the row count and the address count rarely match.
- Different filters, not different people
- Headcount, seniority, tenure and hiring signals live in Sales Navigator. The same people are reachable from here through job titles and keywords; it simply takes more searches to carve them out — which is the argument for saving the ones that work.
Three ways to fill the rest of the list
A shallow search is not a dead end. It is an argument for running more than one.
Save the ones that work
A search you re-run on a schedule charges only for people who were not on it last time, so several narrow searches end up cheaper than one broad one you keep repeating.
Upload what you already have
A conference list, a CRM export, a sheet somebody keeps by hand. Only the empty email cells are filled, and the cost is shown before the job starts.
How one address is found
The same lookup, explained: sightings first, house style second, and a check that sometimes proves nothing.
Asked by people searching without a Sales Navigator seat
How many people can one plain LinkedIn search give me?
As many as LinkedIn will page through, which is not unlimited and is a good deal fewer than a lead search reaches. A well-filtered people search is usually tens of rows. If you need thousands from a single pass, that is what Sales Navigator is for; if you need thousands out of LinkedIn itself, it is several searches rather than one.
Do I need LinkedIn Premium to run this?
No. A free LinkedIn account runs a people search, and Cuvy reads the page that search produces. Premium changes what LinkedIn shows you and how many searches it lets you run in a month, so it can change how many rows end up on the page — but nothing about the run itself depends on it.
Why is my file shorter than the number at the top of the search?
Three reasons, and none of them costs you anything. Rows with no visible name have nobody to look up. People you have already paid for once are not charged again. And the count LinkedIn puts above a search is an estimate it revises as you page down. The file says which row was which.
Does a run show up as a profile view?
Not for the search itself. Cuvy reads the results page you already opened rather than opening each profile behind it, so a run does not show up in the list of people who viewed a profile. Profiles you open yourself are still your own browsing, and they count the way they always did.
Can I keep using LinkedIn while a run is going?
Yes, and you can close the tab entirely. The run continues in the background at a human pace and tells you when the file is ready. Nothing is sent from your account while it works — no messages, no invitations, no endorsements.
What about people who are not on LinkedIn at all?
A search cannot reach them, but a list can. If you already have their names and employers in a spreadsheet, upload it and only the empty email cells are filled. For a single person whose company you know, one lookup in the web app does the same job with nothing installed.
50 addresses free every month · no card