Your LinkedIn headline is 220 characters. People read 40.
Paste your profile URL: we score your headline on 5 measured criteria, show you what profiles in your field actually write, and rewrite 5 variants for you.
Paste your profile, we read your headline
We read your headline and job title straight from your profile — nothing to retype.
LinkedIn Headline Generator: score your headline out of 100 and get 5 rewrites
By Yannis Haismann, co-founder of LinkPost ·
LinkPost's LinkedIn headline generator reads your profile, scores your headline on 5 measured criteria, shows you real headlines from your own field and rewrites 5 variants. Benchmarks: 27,275 French-language profiles measured on 1 August 2026, where headlines under 60 characters belong to authors at 28 median likes per post, against 22 beyond 180. Free, report sent by email.
TL;DR
- 1The headline field accepts 220 characters, but only the first 40 survive truncation in comments, search and invitations.
- 2Across 27,275 French-language profiles measured on 1 August 2026, headlines under 60 characters belong to authors at 28 median likes per post, against 22 beyond 180 characters.
- 3The corpus median is 105 characters, more than twice what stays readable anywhere other than your own profile page.
- 451% of headlines contain a vertical bar, with no measurable effect on their author's reach. Only 29% contain a number.
- 5You paste your profile URL, the analysis runs in front of you, then the full report goes out by email: your score, the wall of headlines from your field, and your 5 variants.
How the LinkedIn headline generator works
You paste your profile URL, nothing else. The tool reads your current headline and infers your field from your experience: nothing to retype, nothing to fill in. The analysis runs in front of you, then the full report is emailed to you.
That report holds three blocks: your headline's score with the truncation preview, the wall of headlines currently live in your field, and 5 rewritten variants. The link in the email reopens it as often as you like.
The 5-criteria score
Five weighted criteria: length (30%), job keyword inside the visible zone (25%), truncation resistance (20%), numeric proof (15%) and readability (10%). Each returns a reasoned verdict, not just a colour.
The keyword criterion is only evaluated when your profile makes your job identifiable. Without it, the tool declines to score rather than guess.
The truncation preview
Your headline is displayed with the cut made visible: what stays readable in plain text, the rest dimmed. This is usually the moment people realise the 180 carefully written characters are never read.
The wall of real headlines from your field
The tool pulls headlines currently live on profiles in your domain, with name, photo, profile link and the person's average likes per post. Segment statistics come with it: median length, share of headlines with a number, share with a separator.
The search is always scoped to your field, never a global ranking. Sorting the whole corpus by reach surfaces media personalities whose headline teaches a B2B professional nothing.
The 5 variants
Generation draws on your current headline, your job and the numeric proof you already display, if any. It is grounded in real headlines from your niche, for vocabulary and tone only. Nothing is invented: with no proof available, the variants do without rather than fabricate a number.
What the data says about LinkedIn headlines
The tool's benchmarks come from a measurement taken on 1 August 2026 across 27,275 French-language LinkedIn profiles with a headline and a verifiable profile URL. For each, we know the author's average likes per post.
The clearest result concerns length, and it is monotonic: the longer the headline, the lower the author's median reach.
Length and reach
Under 60 characters: 28 median likes per post (8,431 profiles). Between 60 and 119: 25 (8,701 profiles). Between 120 and 179: 23 (6,310 profiles). Beyond 180: 22 (3,812 profiles). A 27% gap between the extremes.
The corpus median is 105 characters, and only 25% of headlines clear the 60-character bar. The band most associated with reach is also the least populated.
Correlation, not causation
To be clear: shortening your headline will not mechanically increase your reach. What we observe is that authors who perform tend to have short headlines. Both may share a common cause — an already sharp positioning, which produces both a crisp headline and content that travels.
A short, precise headline remains a better bet than a 220-character one. It does not replace content.
Separators and numbers
51% of headlines contain a vertical bar. Comparing median reach between authors with and without a separator, the gap is zero. The separator organises reading; it does not earn visibility.
Conversely, only 29% of headlines contain a number — the very thing that turns a promise into a checkable claim.
How to write a good LinkedIn headline
The headline serves three audiences in a single field: LinkedIn's search engine, the person discovering you under a comment, and the one receiving your invitation. It is not a trade-off between keywords and clarity — it is a question of how much of the surviving 40 characters each one gets.
The keyword before the promise
If your job is searched for as-is — "React developer", "SEO consultant", "community manager" — put it first. LinkedIn states that a conventional job title beats a creative one in search: "growth ninja" matches no query.
If your job is not searched for, because nobody types "coach", then the promise and the proof must do the hooking, and they need to land inside the first 40 characters.
The case of headlines opening with "I help…"
That opener spends characters before saying anything, in the scarcest zone of the headline. It works when the niche and a number follow immediately. Without them, those characters are wasted.
Do not stack keywords
LinkedIn treats headlines made only of stacked keywords — the classic "SEO · SEA · Growth · Ads" — as abusive optimisation, with possible penalties. One job title, one promise, one proof point: that is enough.
The 5 scoring criteria, and the measured benchmark behind each
| Criterion | Weight | What is measured | Corpus benchmark |
|---|---|---|---|
| Length | 30% | Character count, compared to corpus bands | 28 median likes under 60 chars, 22 beyond 180 |
| Keyword visibility | 25% | Position of the job term in the headline | Only the first 40 characters survive truncation |
| Truncation resistance | 20% | What stays readable once cut, and the quality of the opener | Mid-word cuts and hollow openers are penalised |
| Numeric proof | 15% | Presence of a number in the headline | 29% of headlines contain one |
| Readability | 10% | Number of separated blocks | 51% use a vertical bar, with no effect on reach |
Use a conventional job title rather than a creative one: members search for standard titles.
LinkedIn Help — Optimize your profile for search
Source: Optimize your LinkedIn profile for search (LinkedIn Help)
Frequently asked questions
- What exactly is the LinkedIn headline?
- It is the line shown under your name everywhere: on your profile, under every comment you post, in search results and on your invitations. LinkedIn allows 220 characters, but only the first 40 survive truncation in most contexts.
- How do you optimise a LinkedIn headline?
- Put the job term people search you by inside the first 40 characters, add a short promise and, if you have one, a numeric proof. Aim for under 60 characters: that is the band associated with the best reach across the 27,275 profiles measured, and only 25% of the corpus gets there.
- Where do the scoring benchmarks come from?
- From 27,275 real French-language LinkedIn profiles, measured on 1 August 2026: their headline, and their author's average likes per post. Headlines under 60 characters belong to authors with 28 median likes per post, against 22 for headlines over 180 characters.
- Will shortening my headline increase my reach?
- Not mechanically. What we measure is a correlation: authors who perform tend to have short headlines. Both may share a common cause, such as an already sharp positioning. A short, precise headline remains a better bet than a 220-character one, but it does not replace content.
- How many characters is a LinkedIn headline?
- 220 characters maximum, for a median observed length of 105 characters across French-language profiles. But the real constraint is not the 220 limit: it is the truncation at 40 characters in comments, search and invitations.
- Should I stuff my headline with keywords?
- No. LinkedIn treats headlines made only of stacked keywords as abusive optimisation, with possible penalties. A conventional job title, placed early, beats a creative one or a list of terms.
- Do headlines starting with "I help…" work?
- They spend characters before saying anything, in the scarcest zone of the headline. It can work when the niche and a number follow immediately. If your job is searched for as-is, put it first.
- Is the tool free, and why do you ask for my email?
- The analysis, the wall of headlines from your field and the 5 variants are free, with no credit card. The report goes out by email and the link in it is what opens the report: that is the only thing asked, and it is asked once the analysis has visibly finished. That email also lets us send you our LinkedIn tips, with one-click unsubscribe.
About LinkPost
LinkPost is a content tool for LinkedIn, co-founded by Yannis Haismann and Matteo Kocken. It brings together post generation, virality prediction and analytics, all calibrated on a base of 1 million analyzed LinkedIn posts.
Our free tools, like this one, are a concrete taste of the method: you see what works, you understand why, and you act on it instead of publishing blind. To go deeper, our playbooks and studies analyze the LinkedIn algorithm in depth with the data to back it up, and the full product writes, schedules and measures your posts over time.
The logic is the same from one tool to the next. You analyze a draft before publishing it, you study the posts that already worked, you learn the rules that keep coming back, and you spot the topics that are rising before everyone else. Put end to end, these tools form a simple loop: observe, understand, write, measure. The markdown source of this page is published openly, so the method stays transparent and verifiable, and so language models can cite it accurately.
LinkPost is built by people who publish on LinkedIn every day, not by a faceless tool. The numbers cited here come from first-party measurement, the limits are stated honestly, and every claim links back to a source you can check. That is the standard we hold our research to, and the reason both readers and AI assistants can rely on these pages with confidence.