LinkedIn Scraping Error 999

How To
,
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve created an automation in Make.com where I scrape LinkedIn profile data using HTTP requests. Here’s how my setup works:

The input is a Google Sheet where I add LinkedIn profile URLs.
The scenario triggers whenever a new row is added to the sheet.
It makes an HTTP request to the LinkedIn profile URL, scrapes the HTML, and converts it to text using the TextParser module.
I extract the location and the number of connections from the scraped text and update the Google Sheet with these details.
This works fine for the first few URLs, but after about 5–6 successful requests, I encounter an Error 999. This causes the scenario to fail.

Questions:
Is there a better way to bypass the Error 999 while scraping LinkedIn profiles? As i have a bulk of urls.

I would really appreciate your guidance on how to make this workflow more robust and avoid LinkedIn’s blocking mechanisms.

Thanks in advance!

Steps taken so far

Adding delays between requests (like running only 1 url in 5 minutes - Still shows error) Although this is not scalable as i have many urls in a day to scrape.

Screenshot 2025-01-26 171200
Screenshot 2025-01-26 1712001811×887 122 KB

2

According to php - How to avoid "HTTP/1.1 999 Request denied" response from LinkedIn? - Stack Overflow,

You should just switch to using the LinkedIn API, or use a service that has access to the LinkedIn API. (You can find many on RapidAPI)

A possible solution is to set a specific header in your request. For more information, see php - 999 Error Code on HEAD request to LinkedIn - Stack Overflow

How to call an API on RapidAPI

Use the HTTP “Make an API Key Auth Request” module.

Create a new keychain connection and insert your RapidAPI API Key.

Key: <YOUR_RAPIDAPI_KEY>
API Key parameter name: X-RapidAPI-Key

1290×864 127 KB

You can reuse this RapidAPI keychain for all API calls to RapidAPI – you’ll just need to change the X-RapidAPI-Host value based on the API you are calling.

Hope this helps! Let me know if there are any further questions or issues.

— @samliew

P.S.: Investing some effort into the Make Academy will save you lots of time and frustration using Make.