How I Built a Free LinkedIn Lead Scraper Using Google Search API

LinkedIn is the goldmine of B2B leads. But scraping LinkedIn directly often means paying for expensive APIs or running into limits.

I wanted to build a system that could:

Find targeted LinkedIn profiles (e.g., CEOs in the automotive industry in the US)

Extract their name, title, profile link, and a snippet of their bio

Save it all to a Google Sheet for easy outreach

Run without paying for any premium scraping tool

So, I created a LinkedIn lead scraper using the free Google Search API — and it can generate 1,000 fresh leads per day at zero cost.

The Core Idea

Instead of scraping LinkedIn directly, I use Google search queries with the site:linkedin.com filter.

Example query:

site:linkedin.com/in "CEO" "automotive" "United States"

Google Search API then returns the top results — each one a LinkedIn profile that matches my target.

We grab 10 results per API call, loop through the pages, and dump everything into a Google Sheet automatically.

Step-by-Step Build

1. Setting Up Google Search API

Create a new project in Google Cloud Console

Enable Custom Search API

Generate an API key

Create a Programmable Search Engine (set it to search the entire web) and copy the CX value

2. Building the Automation (in Make.com / n8n)

Set Fields — Define the starting index (1) and max pages (e.g., 10 for 100 leads)

HTTP Request — Call the Google Search API with the search query, API key, CX value, and pagination

Extract Values — Use a code module to clean and structure the data: name, title, LinkedIn URL, snippet, and profile image

Google Sheets Integration — Append each lead to a Google Sheet

Pagination Logic — Check if there’s another page of results, then loop until the max pages are reached

Performance & Limits

On the free tier, Google Search API allows 100 requests/day.

100 requests × 10 results each = 1,000 leads/day

That’s 7,000 fresh leads per week without paying a cent

Need more? Upgrade your quota and scale as high as you want.

Why This Works So Well

✅ No direct scraping of LinkedIn (avoids account bans) ✅ Fully automated — runs while you sleep ✅ Easy to adapt for any role, industry, or location ✅ Works perfectly for cold outreach, market research, and sales prospecting

This is the kind of build that lets you skip hours of manual prospecting and still get hyper-targeted leads.

If you want to see it in action and get the full workflow, I’m sharing the live demo and templates inside my AI & Automation community — where we go deep into lead gen, automation, and no-code builds.

https://www.skool.com/yar-ai-automation-school-9911