Guide
How to export your LinkedIn connections (and what to do with the file)
Published 12 October 2026
Your LinkedIn network is not LinkedIn's. Every connection you have made is a row of data you are allowed to take with you, and the export takes about two minutes. This page walks through the download, explains what is actually inside the file, and suggests what to do with it afterwards.
Getting the file
On desktop, open LinkedIn, click your profile picture, choose Settings, then Data privacy, and find the section called “Get a copy of your data”. Pick the smaller option that gets you your connections and pending invitations quickly, or the full archive if you want everything. LinkedIn then asks you to confirm your password and emails the file to you — the fast export usually arrives within about ten minutes, a full archive can take up to a day.
On the mobile app the same control lives under Settings, then Data privacy, but the download is easier to handle from a computer: the file lands by email, and you will want it on disk, not on a phone.
What is inside connections.csv
The fast export gives you a CSV named connections.csv with one row per person: first and last name, the LinkedIn profile URL, the company they worked at, their job title, and the date you connected. Two things surprise people the first time they open it:
First, the company and title are from when you connected, not from today — the person who joined you as “Sales Manager at Group X” three years ago may run their own firm now. Second, the email column is only filled in for people who let LinkedIn share their address with their connections. For most files that is a minority of rows, and an older file has fewer still.
A full archive contains more files, including your messages, but the connections CSV is the interesting one: it is the structured list of who you know, by name.
What the file is good for
The raw spreadsheet answers the question “who do I know?” sorted by name, which is almost never the question you have. What you usually want is “who do I know at a hotel group in the Gulf?” or “who has moved into the company I am selling to?” — and those are grouping and filtering questions. Some people pivot the CSV in a spreadsheet; that works for one question but loses the context that makes an approach warm.
That is what Retis does with the same file: it reads your connections CSV, groups the people into an industry map, and when you type what you need, names the one person in your own network who can open that door, with the reason why. The map is free to make; the matching and the contact briefs are on the plan at $9.90 a month.
A note on how this site is run
Retis is built and operated end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how a two-person-sized company keeps a page like this one current.