Last week, LinkedIn suddenly removed Apollo and Seamless’ business pages from its site. To the surprise of no one, the SaaS community erupted with hot takes.
The Bigger Story
For years, sales intelligence tools like Apollo and Seamless have depended on LinkedIn as a go-to source for contact data – mining names, job titles, and emails to power their prospecting engines.
LinkedIn’s recent crackdown, however, reveals these companies were potentially using scraping methods that skirted the platform’s Terms of Service – methods LinkedIn largely tolerated, until now.
So, what changed?
- Regulatory pressure from privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA are heating up.
- The sales intelligence market is booming and every startup in the space wants to scrape Linkedin, ramping up scrutiny.
- LinkedIn is specifically targeting Chrome extensions and other tools that bypass its official APIs.
But there’s a strategic angle people seem to be missing here 👇
LinkedIn isn’t just protecting user privacy, it’s reclaiming control over its most valuable asset – user data.
By cracking down on scraping, the company is:
- Steering sales teams toward its own paid product, Sales Navigator.
- Safeguarding data for its future AI initiatives (don’t forget LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft which has major partnerships with OpenAI)
Adding to the drama 🍿
Five days after the takedown, Apollo’s CEO posted a LinkedIn update assuring users that all was fine. But the vague and (debatably) delayed message sparked backlash from customers who felt they’d been left in limbo.
He followed up with a new post yesterday that’s worth a read. Warning: tough crowd in the comments.
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