LinkedIn Boolean Search
Titles, skills, location and exclusions in — a paste-ready Boolean string out, plus the Google X-ray version.
Separate terms with commas. Multi-word terms are quoted for you; brackets, asterisks and stray quotes are dropped because LinkedIn does not read them. Nothing leaves your browser.
LinkedIn search string
0 operators · Sales Navigator allows 15
Your Boolean string appears here — paste it into the search bar at the top of LinkedIn.
Google X-ray search
0 words · Google reads up to 32
The same search for Google — public profiles only, no login, no operator cap.
On LinkedIn.com the string goes in the main search bar; pick People on the results page. Locations and companies match better through the filters there than as keywords, so if a search comes back thin, move them out of the string and into the filters. Sales Navigator and Recruiter take the same string.
How it works
How to build a LinkedIn Boolean search?
Name the job titles
Every title the person might use, comma-separated. They become an OR group in quotes.
Add the keywords
Must-haves are joined with AND; nice-to-haves become another OR group.
Narrow or rule out
Locations, companies and an Exclude list — the last becomes a single NOT group.
Copy or open the search
Copy the string, or open it straight in LinkedIn or Google. Nothing leaves your browser.
What you get
A string LinkedIn actually reads
Phrases quoted for you
Multi-word titles get quotes; single words don’t. No stray quotes either way.
Grouped with parentheses only
The one grouping symbol LinkedIn recognises. Brackets and braces you type are dropped.
Operators in capitals
AND, OR, NOT — uppercase, or LinkedIn reads them as words. Never + or −.
An operator count
Sales Navigator stops at 15; LinkedIn.com stops earlier and won’t say where. You see the number.
A Google X-ray twin
The same search as site:linkedin.com/in — no login, no operator cap, public profiles only.
Open it in one click
Search on LinkedIn or Google straight from the result box.
The rules
What LinkedIn’s search bar understands
Five things: AND, OR and NOT in capitals, quotation marks around an exact phrase, and parentheses to group. Quotes are resolved first, then parentheses, then NOT, then AND, then OR. Everything else — square brackets, braces, angle brackets, asterisks — is read as ordinary characters, and + and − are not officially supported. Stop words like “by”, “in” and “with” are ignored inside a phrase. LinkedIn.com also caps the number of operators per search without saying how many; Sales Navigator allows fifteen, Recruiter has no cap. When a search hits the wall, the Google X-ray version below it runs the same terms with no cap at all.
Where it pays off
Who searches LinkedIn with a string?
You are sourcing candidates
A title group, two must-have skills and a NOT for “recruiter” is most of a sourcing search. Build it once here, then paste it into LinkedIn.com, Sales Navigator or Recruiter — the string is the same in all three.
You are prospecting
Titles that buy, the industry words that mark the right company, and the seniority you don’t want. Sales Navigator takes the string with the same operators, up to fifteen of them.
You have run out of LinkedIn searches
The free search limit and the operator cap both disappear when Google does the searching. The X-ray string finds the same public profiles from outside LinkedIn.
You want to know how you are found
Run the search a recruiter would run for your role. If your profile does not surface, the words they search are the words your headline is missing.
Questions