LinkedIn Groups API
Resolve a group by ID or URL, or search groups by keyword. Useful for community research and for finding where a niche audience actually gathers.
Example response
Generated from the live API, so it is exactly the shape your code will parse.
{
"element": {
"linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates",
"name": null,
"logo": null,
"heroImage": null,
"description": null,
"rules": null,
"createdAt": null,
"welcomeNote": null,
"admins": {
"totalCount": 100,
"text": null,
"profiles": []
}
},
"query": {
"groupId": null
},
"status": "ok"
}Why groups are still worth querying
Groups are unfashionable, which is exactly why they are useful. A group with eleven thousand members organised around a narrow professional topic is a far cleaner definition of an audience than any set of job-title filters, and almost nobody is mining them.
group-search takes a keyword and returns matching groups with their member counts. group resolves one group by ID or URL and returns its full record. Both are $0.0040 at Starter.
Groups plus post search
The combination worth knowing: find a relevant group, then use post-search scoped to that group to read what is being discussed inside it. That gives you topic-level intelligence for a specific community rather than a firehose of everything published on a keyword.
For market research this is the cheapest qualitative signal available — a few dollars of balance buys you a genuine read on what a professional community is arguing about this quarter.
What is and is not available
Group metadata and public group content are available. Member lists are not — group membership is not public data, and we do not join groups to read them. If you need to reach people in a community, the honest route is to identify the topic and then find people by their public professional attributes, not to try to extract a roster.
This is a low-competition, long-tail corner of the API. If you are researching a niche industry, it is often the fastest way to find where its practitioners actually talk.
Identifying a group
Group URLs look like linkedin.com/groups/137595, and that trailing number is the group ID. Unlike a profile's vanity URL it does not change, so it is safe to store as a key — one of the few identifiers in this API where the obvious choice is also the stable one.
Pass it as groupId, or hand the whole URL to url and let the endpoint parse it. If you only have a name, group-search will resolve it, though common words return several plausible matches and you should check member counts before picking one.
Group names are not unique. There are dozens of groups called some variation of "Data Engineering", of wildly different sizes and activity levels. Resolve once, store the ID, and never search by name again in a pipeline.
Where groups fit in a research workflow
Groups are best used as a discovery step rather than a destination. Find the two or three where your audience actually gathers, then point post search at them to read what is being discussed, and people search at the job titles that keep appearing.
That sequence — community, then conversation, then people — produces a far tighter audience definition than starting from filters, because you are letting practitioners tell you how they describe themselves instead of guessing at titles.
What it costs
Prices are per request, charged from a prepaid balance. Bigger top-ups lower every row — Scale takes 55% off.
| Request | Starter | Pro (42% off) | Scale (55% off) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Group | $0.0400 | $0.0232 | $0.0180 |
| Group search page | $0.0400 | $0.0232 | $0.0180 |
Failed requests are never charged. See full pricing.
Frequently asked questions
Can I get the member list of a LinkedIn group?
No. Group membership is not public data. This API returns group metadata and public group content only.
How do I find groups in my industry?
Use group-search with a keyword and page through the results. Member count is returned on each result, which is a reasonable proxy for how active a group is.
Can I read posts inside a group?
Yes, via the post search endpoint with a group scope, for content that is publicly visible.
What does the Groups API cost?
Group lookup and group search are both $0.0040 per request at Starter, falling to $0.0018 at Scale.