# Watch any public LinkedIn profile URL: https://useembers.com/help/signals/watchlist/ Category: Signals and agents Updated: 2026-10-31 Last verified: 2026-10-31 > Put your own profile, competitors, influencers, or company pages on the Watchlist. Embers ranks their engagers against your ICP and shows each profile's stats. The Watchlist is where you point Embers at public LinkedIn profiles and company pages. For each one, Embers collects the people who react to its posts or comment on them, matches them against your [ideal customer profile](/help/getting-started/define-your-icp/), and ranks them in your queue. Each profile also has [stats](#profile-stats): its followers, how often it posts, and how its posts are engaged with, next to the ICP engagers it brings you. > **Warning: Watching anyone else needs Solo or above** > > Free watches one profile, and it must be your own. Every other role, and more than one profile, needs Solo or above. The trial runs on Solo, so it has Solo's 5 watched profiles. ## Add a profile to watch ### Open Add monitor Go to **Watchlist** (`/watchlist`) and choose **Add monitor**, the blue button at the right of the top bar, beside the notifications bell. The same button sits in the same place on Leads, a lead's page, and Comments once your own profile is on the Watchlist; on Posts that place holds **Monitor post**, which opens this panel on **Posts**. It is also in the command palette, and in **More** on a phone. A panel opens titled **Watch a profile**, with **Profiles**, **Keywords**, **Posts**, and **Import** at the top: the same panel [tracks a keyword](/help/signals/keyword-tracking/), [qualifies a post](/help/signals/qualify-a-post/), or [imports a CSV or a list of profiles and keywords](/help/signals/import-profiles-and-keywords/) from another tool. It opens on the kind of the tab you are on. ### Paste the URL Paste the public URL under **LinkedIn profile URL**: a person's `linkedin.com/in/` page, or a company's `/company/` or a school's `/school/` page. ### Say why you are watching Pick a role under **Why you are watching**: for a person, Your profile, Competitor, Influencer, Investor, Teammate, Advisor, Client founder, or Other; for a company or school page, Competitor, Investor, or Other. Pasting a page URL switches a person's role to Competitor. ### Choose Add profile The profile is queued for its first scan, and "Added to watchlist. Public history scan is starting." confirms it. Embers never asks for a password, a cookie, or a browser extension. Under **Add profile**, **Suggested for you** lists profiles picked for your ICP, two at first. **Watch profile** or **Watch page** adds one in place, as **Add profile** does. Embers also suggests profiles to stop watching once they stop posting or stop drawing people who fit your ICP, and **Undo** puts the same one back. See [act on suggestions](/help/signals/suggestions/). Below the suggestions, **On your watchlist** lists the profiles and pages you already watch. Each row has the photo, the name and headline, **View on LinkedIn**, a status such as "Watching" with the date you added it, the role menu to change why you are watching, and a bin icon to remove it. Your own profile shows **Your profile** with a lock in place of the role menu. The roles and what removing a profile deletes are covered in [watched profiles and roles](/help/account-and-billing/linkedin-accounts-and-seats/). ## What a watched profile produces What Embers runs depends on whether the profile is yours: - **Your own profile** gets one agent, **Your profile**. It reads the [reactions and comments on your posts](/help/signals/post-engagement/) and the [replies and reactions to the comments you leave elsewhere](/help/signals/comment-engagement/). You never appear as a lead, and your posts feed the [outreach voice](/help/outreach/outreach-voice/). - **Every other role** gets one agent too, shown on **Agents** (`/agents`) as a **Watchlist Tracker** card reading "Watching" and the name. It collects the engagers on that profile's posts, plus the replies and reactions to the comments that profile leaves on other people's posts. It also reads the post under each of those comments: when that post asks for something you sell, its author is checked against your ICP and can become a lead, credited to the watched profile. Those comments are listed under **Watchlist** on the [Comments page](/help/signals/comments-page/). Company pages skip the outbound comments. For every other role, the role is a label for filtering and reports; it does not change what is read. Employees of the watched person's company are left out of the results, so a competitor's own staff do not fill your queue. Engagement on someone else's content counts for less than the same action on yours. A like on a watched profile's post carries half the weight of a like on your own post, because following a space is not the same as engaging with you. Comments and replies keep most of their weight. Someone who engages with two of your watched profiles gets a 1.3 times boost, and three or more gets 1.7 times. See [what raises and lowers a score](/help/leads/how-scoring-works/#what-raises-and-lowers-a-score). Each agent scans every 24 hours. The first scan reads existing public history rather than starting from today; see [what the first scan reads](/help/signals/history-lookback/). ## Read the Watchlist screen The Watchlist lists every monitor in one table: watched profiles, company pages, [tracked keywords](/help/signals/keyword-tracking/), and [qualified posts](/help/signals/qualify-a-post/). When any monitor is paused, a yellow line above everything says so, for example "2 monitors are paused, so they find no new leads.", with **Resume** (**Resume both**, **Resume all 3**) for the ones someone paused. When a plan change paused them it says "Your plan paused them: they start again when you pick a plan." with **See plans** instead, since **Resume** cannot start those. The two tiles show: - **People who engaged**: across your monitors. While your first scan runs, the people it has read so far, under "Read so far by your first scan". - **Leads from monitors**: and where they came from, for example "29 via traxy, 1 via your profile". It counts the leads your monitors found, so it can be lower than the **Leads** count in the sidebar, which also counts leads from [keyword searches](/help/signals/keyword-tracking/) that are not on the Watchlist. The tabs split the list into **All**, **People**, **Companies**, **Keywords**, and **Posts**; each monitor sits under one tab, so the counts add up to All. A tab with nothing in it is left out until you add that kind (with **Add monitor**). **Search watchlist** matches names, types, and tags. The columns are: - **Monitor**: the name, with its photo or an icon for its kind, and one line saying what it is, for example "Company page · competitor", "Your profile · your posts and comments", "Keyword", or "Post by" and the author. - **Status**: a dot and a sentence (see below). - **Followers** and **Posts/wk**: on a profile or company page row, its follower count with the change, such as "+82 in 30d", and how often it posts, over the period the **7d** / **30d** / **90d** switch above the table picks (30 days unless you change it). Each heading says the period under it, for example "30 days". The engagement rate and the ICP engagers are in the profile's [stats](#profile-stats): select its row. - **Last change**: on a watched person's row, the newest [company change](/help/leads/company-changes/) Embers confirmed in the last 90 days for them or the company they work at, such as a new role or a hiring burst, with its source and when Embers checked on hover, or a dash when there is none. The column appears only while a row on the page has a change, and only on Solo and above. - **Engaged**: the people who engaged with it since you added it. The heading says "All time". - **Leads**: the people among them who match your ICP, also all time. - **Added**: how long ago you added it. Select a column heading to sort by it, and select it again to flip the order. **Monitor** starts A to Z, and **Status** puts the monitors that need attention first (failed, paused, setting up, no signals yet, then reading). **Engaged**, **Leads**, and **Added** start with the most or newest. A third selection returns to newest first. On a phone the rows are cards, with a profile's followers, engagement rate, and ICP engagers under its name, and the **Sort by** menu in the toolbar offers **Newest**, **Oldest**, **Most leads**, **Most engaged**, **Most followers**, **Posts most often**, **Name A to Z**, and **Needs attention first**. The list shows 20 monitors a page, with **Rows** (50 or 100) and the page controls under it once there is more than one page, and your sort and rows are remembered when you come back from another page. **View** at the end of the toolbar shows the monitors as cards instead of a table on a wider screen: pick **Cards** to preview them on your own monitors, then **Apply cards** to keep it, or **Back to table** (or `Esc`). The choice is yours on this page, in this browser. Cards have no column headings, so they sort from the **Sort by** menu. Drag a column's edge to resize it; Embers remembers the widths in this browser, and **Reset widths** appears in the toolbar once you have dragged one, and puts every column back to its default width. It shows in the table only: cards have no column widths. The table pages 20 monitors at a time. The tab, sort, search, and page are in the address, so a refresh or a shared link keeps the view. The status says what happened last and what happens next: | Status | Meaning | | --- | --- | | Read 3h ago · next in 21h | The last scan worked; the next one is due in 21 hours | | Reading now | A scan is running now | | Setting up | Added; the first scan has not started | | Waiting for its first read | Its agent is on, but has not finished a scan yet | | No signals yet | The scan worked but found nothing to rank | | Failed · retry from Agents | The last scan could not read it. Retry it from **Agents** | | Paused · read 3w ago | Its agent is paused, and it last read the profile 3 weeks ago. **Resume** beside it starts it again, as do the profile's stats and **Agents** | | Paused by your plan · read 3w ago | A plan change paused it. It starts again when you pick a plan | | Audience too large to collect | A profile with 250,000 followers or more, on hold. See [very large audiences](#very-large-audiences) | | Read 2d ago | A qualified post, read 2 days ago | | Reading who engaged | A qualified post being read now | | Failed · try it again | A qualified post that could not be read. Qualify it again | Select a profile or company page row to open its [stats](#profile-stats), or choose **Profile stats** from its menu. The row stays highlighted while its stats are open. To change or remove that profile, choose **Manage** from the row's menu. A row that has only **Manage** and **View leads**, such as a post with no LinkedIn link, shows them as two icon buttons; point at one to see its name. Every other row has a menu, in this order: **Profile stats** (on a profile or company page), **Manage** (the Add monitor panel on that monitor's kind, where you can change or remove it), **View leads** (the leads list filtered to that source), **Open on LinkedIn**, and, on profiles and keywords, **New leads go to**. **New leads go to** picks a [lead list](/help/leads/leads-list/#fill-a-list-automatically) that this profile's or keyword's new leads are added to, or **No list**. Picking a list also adds the leads it already found. **Create new list...** names a new list inside the same menu and picks it. On a phone the lists are part of the same menu. On **Agents**, the profile's card and its details have the same choice under **New leads go to**. Until anything is watched the page is one card, "Nothing is being watched yet", with **Add monitor**; the tiles, tabs and search appear with the first monitor, and **Add monitor** moves to the top bar. With three monitors or fewer, a **Watch more to find more leads** card under the table suggests a competitor, a person your buyers follow, or a phrase they post about, with **Add monitor**. After that, an empty tab names what is missing and offers the step that fixes it, for example "Not watching any company pages yet" with **Watch a company page**, or "No keywords yet" with **Add a keyword**. A search that matches nothing reads "No monitors match" with **Clear search**. ## Profile stats Every profile on your Watchlist, your own and each person or company page you watch, has stats that answer two questions: is this profile worth watching, and what can you show a client about it. They sit next to the ICP engagers the profile brought you, so a large or busy audience never passes for a good source on its own. Stats are on every plan, for every profile you watch. You find them in five places: - **The Watchlist table**: the **Followers** and **Posts/wk** columns, over the period of the **7d** / **30d** / **90d** switch above the table (on a phone's cards, the engagement rate and ICP engagers too). - **The profile's stats**: select its row. Pick **7 days**, **30 days**, or **90 days**. See [read a profile's stats](#read-a-profiles-stats). - **Agents** (`/agents`): open the profile's agent (**Your profile**, or its **Watchlist Tracker**) and select **Profile stats** in its details. - **Client reports**: the **Watched profiles** section shows every profile's stats for the report's dates. See [what a client report contains](/help/reports-and-workspaces/client-reports/#what-the-report-contains). - **AI assistants**: the `profile_stats` tool gives a [connected assistant](/help/integrations/mcp/) the same numbers for every watched profile. ### Read a profile's stats The stats open on one sentence that sums up the period, for example "traxy posted 5 times in the last 30 days, about once a week. Its posts averaged 46.4 engagements, a 7.5% engagement rate on its 621 followers. 19 of the 93 people Embers read on them match your ICP." Under the profile's name, its status says whether its agent is reading, for example "Paused · read 3w ago". On a wider screen, the arrows beside the profile's name open the previous or next profile in the table, in its current order, so you can compare profiles without closing the stats. A grey note under the sentence says what limits the numbers, when something does: - **A paused agent.** "Embers last read this page Oct 5, and its agent is paused." **Resume** turns the agent back on from here, the same as on **Agents**. - **Weeks Embers has not read.** Weeks that start after the last read are hatched and say "not read" under them in **Posts each week**: the profile may have posted, and Embers has not looked yet. So is the week of the last read when it shows no posts, since the rest of that week went unread. When the whole period comes after the last read, the opening sentence says "Embers hasn't read" the profile since that day, rather than that it did not post. Weeks from before Embers had posts for the profile are hatched too and say "not watched". - **Posts Embers does not have.** "Embers has this profile's posts since Oct 2, so the numbers start there." - **No posts in the period.** The sentence says so, and **See 90 days** switches to the longest period. Then six numbers in one grid: **Followers**, **Posts a week**, **Eng. rate**, **Avg per post**, **Engagers read**, and **ICP engagers**. Point at one, or tap it, for what it counts. Without posts in the period only **Followers** has a number, and the rest of the grid says what fills it in. On a profile you watch, each number has your own profile's under it for the same period, for example "You: 0.05%" under an engagement rate of 7.5%, so you can see how the profile compares with yours. If you did not post in the period, **Posts a week** says "You: no posts". This needs your own profile on the Watchlist. Under the grid, three tabs: - **Overview**: the follower line and **Posts each week**. When the follower change counts from a reading before the period, the line starts there, dashed, so it can be drawn from one reading inside the period. Each week shows its number of posts, with the week's engagement rate under it. - **Top posts**: up to five of the period's posts, most engagement first. Switch to **ICP engagers** to put the posts that brought the most people matching your ICP first: the post with the most likes is not always the one that brings buyers. Select a post to open it. - **ICP engagers**: up to five people who match your ICP, by how often they engaged with those posts. Select one to open their lead. ### What each number counts | Number | What it counts | | --- | --- | | Followers | The profile's LinkedIn follower count, with its change over the window: the latest count by the end of the window minus the last count on or before its start (or the first count inside the window when Embers has none that old) | | Posts a week (Posts/wk) | The profile's own posts published in the window, divided by the days covered and multiplied by 7. Reposts of other people's posts do not count | | Avg per post | The average reactions, comments, and reposts on those posts, as LinkedIn shows the counts publicly. It is not limited to the people Embers read | | Engagement rate | For each post, its reactions, comments, and reposts divided by the profile's current follower count, averaged over the window's posts. The same formula as the [free engagement rate calculator](/tools/linkedin-engagement-rate-calculator/). Blank when the follower count is unknown or there are no posts | | Engagers read | The different people Embers read reacting to or commenting on the window's posts | | ICP engagers | The engagers read who match your ICP, leaving out people at your own company and anyone at a [company you have blocked](/help/leads/company-blocklist/) | Followers, engagement, engagement rate, and engagers read count everyone, your own company and blocked companies included, because they describe the profile's whole audience. Only ICP engagers leave them out, since that is the number that says whether the profile brings you buyers. ### What the numbers cannot tell you - **Engagers read is a floor on big posts.** Embers reads up to 100 reactions and 100 comments per post on a person's profile, and 25 reactions and 15 comments on a company page. On a person's post with 600 reactions, engagers read counts at most 100 of the people who reacted, so compare engagers read between profiles of a similar size, and use engagement per post for the full public counts. - **A week after the last read is unknown, not empty.** A paused agent, or a workspace whose agents have stopped, leaves the weeks after its last read blank. They show as not read until Embers reads the profile again. Weeks from before Embers started watching the profile show as not watched. - **Follower history starts when profile stats launched.** Each profile's first point is the count Embers already had for it. After that, Embers looks the count up again once a week for every profile you watch, and whenever it reads the profile. It keeps one count per profile per day, and the change shows once there are two. A paused profile, or a workspace whose agents have stopped (for example after the [free trial](/help/account-and-billing/free-trial/) ends), keeps its last count. - **Repost counts start with profile stats too.** Posts from before the launch fill in their reposts as Embers re-reads the last 90 days of posts, once a week. - **Embers only has posts from when it started watching.** The first read of a profile goes back up to 30 posts, or 15 on a company page. When the window starts before that, the stats say "since" with the date Embers' posts for the profile begin, and posts per week counts only the days covered. - **A profile that has not been read yet, or has no posts, has no posting or engagement numbers.** A profile on hold for its audience size still shows its follower count, but nothing is collected from it. See [very large audiences](#very-large-audiences). ## Very large audiences Embers does not collect from a profile with 250,000 followers or more, on any plan. Such a profile rarely brings your buyers: in recent workspaces, under 1 in 100 of its engagers matched the ICP, against 5 to 16 in 100 for people's own profiles and teammates. - **When you add it.** If Embers already knows the profile's size, the add is refused. Under the field it says, for example, "This profile has 6M followers. Big audiences rarely contain your buyers, so Embers doesn't collect from accounts this size." The URL stays in the field, so you can change it to someone else. - **After you add it.** Otherwise Embers learns the follower count when it first reads the profile, a few seconds to minutes after the add, and holds it. Nothing is collected from it and there is no rescan. The row reads **On hold**, "Audience too large to collect", and the profile itself says, for example, "This profile has 6M followers. Big audiences rarely contain your buyers, so Embers doesn't collect from accounts this size. Contact support if you need it." - **When it grows past 250,000.** Embers looks up every watched profile's follower count once a week for its [profile stats](#profile-stats), so a profile that reaches 250,000 while you watch it is put on hold the same way, from its next scan. If its count later drops back under 250,000, its scans resume. The refused add and the held profile both offer **Contact support**. Your email app opens a message to the Embers team with the profile's URL and your workspace already filled in; once the team allows the profile, it is collected like any other. A paid workspace that was already collecting from such a profile when this rule began keeps collecting from it. ## Plan limits The watched profile cap is per workspace. Your own profiles and paused profiles count toward it; members never do. | Plan | Watched profiles | | --- | --- | | Free | 1, your own profile only | | Solo | 5 | | Growth | 10 | | Enterprise | 20 | | Agency | 20 per client workspace | At the cap, **Profiles** in the Add monitor panel shows the count as, for example, **Watched profiles** "5 of 5 - at limit" and says "Your plan allows 5 watched profiles. Remove one or upgrade to add more." The **Monitors** step of setup words it differently: **Add** shows a lock and the line under the field reads "Your plan watches 5 profiles. Remove one to add another." See [compare plans and limits](/help/account-and-billing/plans-and-limits/). ## Troubleshooting - **"Some monitors did not load".** One of the lists behind the page failed, so its monitors are missing; the others are shown. Choose **Try again**. - **The URL is refused with "Enter a public LinkedIn profile, company, or school URL."** Paste the full public URL, not a Sales Navigator or messaging link. - **A row reads Failed.** LinkedIn could not read the profile. Check that the URL is right and the profile is public. Choose **Manage** from the row's menu: the profile reads **Needs retry** there and offers a recovery action such as **Rescan this profile**. For agents that stopped across the board, see [find out why your agents stopped scanning](/help/troubleshooting/agents-not-scanning/). - **A row reads No signals yet.** The panel names the reason: no public posts in the lookback window, no engagement on them, nobody who cleared your ICP, matches without enough public detail, or, after a keyword scan, "Buyers matched your ICP, but none of their posts showed a buying need." The panel shows it as **No ranked leads yet** with an action to match: **Rescan this profile**, **Try a narrower source**, or **Watch another profile**. Work through [no leads in your queue yet](/help/troubleshooting/no-leads-yet/) if it stays empty. ## Related - [Watched profiles and roles](/help/account-and-billing/linkedin-accounts-and-seats/): Roles, caps by plan, and what removing one deletes. - [Turn reactions on your posts into leads](/help/signals/post-engagement/): What your own profile's agent collects. - [Find out why your agents stopped scanning](/help/troubleshooting/agents-not-scanning/): Read the status and restart an agent. ## Frequently asked questions **Does the role I pick change what Embers collects?** For every role except your own profile, no. The role is a label on the resulting leads. Your own profile gets post and comment monitoring and never becomes a lead itself. **What happens to my leads if I remove a watched profile?** For any role but your own, the scans stop and existing leads keep their attribution. Removing your own profile deletes the leads that came only from it, after a confirmation that shows the counts. **Can I watch a company page?** Yes. Paste its `/company/` or `/school/` URL in the same field as a person's. Embers reads the engagement on the page's own posts; it does not collect comments the page leaves elsewhere. **How does Embers work out a watched profile's engagement rate?** For each post in the window it adds the public reactions, comments, and reposts, divides by the profile's current follower count, and averages that over the posts. It is the same formula as the free engagement rate calculator. **Do profile stats need a paid plan?** No. Every watched profile has stats on every plan, your own profile on Free included. Client reports, which carry the stats for a client, need Solo or above.