Is It OK to Follow Competitors on LinkedIn? What They Can See

On LinkedIn, following is public on your side and measured on theirs. Know both before you press the button.

Updated September 2026

What can a competitor see when you follow their Page?

The follower count goes up by one, visibly to everyone. Beyond that, what their admins see is in Page analytics.

Admins get follower analytics: how many followers the Page has, how many it gained over a period, and the make-up of the audience by location, job function, seniority, industry and company size. Your follow feeds those figures. If you work at a competitor, your company shows up in the company-size and industry breakdowns along with everyone else's.

Depending on the Page, admins can also see individual followers — names, headlines and when they followed — in the followers section of analytics. So assume a competitor's marketing team can see that you, with your title and your employer in your headline, followed their Page last week.

What they don't get is a notification pushed to them each time, and they don't see what you do after following: which posts you read, how long you spent on them. Reactions and comments, of course, are public.

How do you see who you follow on LinkedIn?

Open your profile and scroll to the Interests section. It has tabs for things like Top Voices, Companies, Groups, Newsletters and Schools. The Companies tab lists the Pages you follow. You can also reach the full list from My Network, through the page that manages people and Pages you follow.

Worth doing once as a visitor would. Anyone looking at your profile can open that same section, and it is often a more revealing picture of your interests than your headline. If a follow there would be awkward for someone to see, the section is where they'd see it.

To stop following a Page, open it and unfollow, or remove it from the list. The Page's count drops by one; the admins aren't told.

Can you see who follows a Page on LinkedIn?

As a visitor, you see the total and, on many Pages, a line saying how many of your own connections follow it, with a few of their faces. You don't get the full list of followers.

As an admin, you see the analytics described above, including individual followers where LinkedIn provides them.

For personal profiles the rule is similar: the owner can see who follows them; everyone else sees the count. The comparison of LinkedIn followers and connections goes through which lists are visible to whom.

Is it OK to follow competitors as an employee?

In most roles, yes, and in some it's expected. People in sales, marketing, product and strategy follow competitors because it's the cheapest market research there is. Most employers would be more concerned if you didn't.

There are a few situations where a follow says more than you intend:

**You're quietly looking for a job.** Following a competitor's Page, especially alongside a burst of connections with its employees, can read as interest in working there. Anyone who glances at your Interests may draw that conclusion.

**Your company has a sensitive relationship with them.** During litigation, a sale, or a messy departure, a public follow can be misread. Better to read their Page without following.

**Your role is confidential.** If your job is competitive intelligence, the follow list on your profile is a public record of what you're looking at.

You can read a company's Page and its posts without following it; following only puts those posts in your feed. And when viewing personal profiles, LinkedIn lets you choose private viewing mode, so the person doesn't see your name in their profile viewers. Page visits already show up to admins only as aggregate visitor numbers.

What the Competitors tab actually tracks

For each Page an admin adds, the tab shows total followers, new followers over the chosen period, and engagement on the Page's posts, laid out next to the admin's own Page. The default window is recent, typically the last month, and admins can change it.

This turns follower growth into a scoreboard. A competitor's marketing lead can open the tab and see, in one table, whether your Page gained more followers than theirs this month and whether your posts drew more engagement. Many do exactly that before planning their own content.

It also means your Page's numbers are read in comparison, not in isolation. A Page with a flat follower line sitting next to competitors with rising ones looks stalled, even if nothing is wrong with it. The engagement column works the same way, which is why post reactions — the likes on LinkedIn posts — are read by rivals as well as by your own audience.

Is it OK to connect with a competitor's employees?

Generally, yes. People change companies, industries are small, and a connection with someone at a competitor is normal professional networking. It's more visible than a follow, though: by default your connections can see your other connections, and a cluster of new connections at one company is noticeable.

A reasonable rule: connect with people you have a real reason to know — a conference, a shared customer, a past colleague — and follow Pages you want to read. Connecting with strangers at a competitor for no stated reason looks like prospecting or recruiting, and they'll likely assume one or the other.

What a Page's follower count signals to the people watching

Because LinkedIn hands admins a benchmark, a Page's follower count isn't only read by potential customers. It's read by competitors, by candidates comparing employers, and by partners deciding which company in a category looks established.

That's the context in which a thin number costs something: a Page that sits well below its peers in a competitor table reads as smaller than it is. Supplied LinkedIn followers change that total and the growth line. They don't change who reads your posts, so the engagement column — which is harder to move and more telling — still reflects your content. The honest way to use the tab on your own side is the same: compare how posts perform, not just how the totals move, since the second is the easier number to shift.

Questions people ask about following competitors on LinkedIn