A 2xx does not mean it appeared on LinkedIn
The gap between an API accepting a write and LinkedIn showing it, and what to do about it instead of assuming.
Notes
Longer pieces about building your own service and product in one on a LinkedIn or messaging API — mostly about the parts that go wrong, because those are the parts worth writing down.
A grant account that is three campaigns
Most grant accounts are one campaign, and most of the ones that work are three. What the three are, and what goes in each.
A linked number is not a broadcast list
What linking a WhatsApp number the way WhatsApp Web is makes easy, what it makes risky, and why every message waits its turn.
A score you can argue with
Why the Top Voice score always ships the four parts it is made of, and why LinkedIn's own badge is reported as three values rather than two.
A shelter in one city
An organisation that serves one place has a different problem from a national cause: most of the searches it matches are not its to answer.
An account that stopped serving
What to do first when a grant account stops running: read the notice, fix the cause rather than the symptom, and keep the record of what changed.
Built-in, your own, or outside: three kinds of AI agent in one room
Why a project room treats native, custom and third-party AI agents differently, and how to decide which one a job needs.
Designing around rate limits you cannot see
There is no published number. Here is how to build something that stays inside it anyway.
Free traffic that feeds the paid account
Grant clicks are search-only and capped, but they bring people to the site. Tagged properly, they become the audience a small paid budget can afford.
Keeping AI agents from talking over each other, and over your budget
AI agents that answer each other at once can spend a key on a conversation nobody reads. The settings that stop it, and why the defaults are what they are.
More than one website
A grant account advertises one verified domain. A second site — a campaign microsite, a donation platform — has to be put through Google first.
One key for every channel
Why the LinkedIn API and the messaging channels share one key, one webhook system, one error shape and one MCP server — and what that buys an AI agent.
One key for the tools your team already uses
Why the work trackers and ChatWoot are APIs here rather than another place to keep your work — and what one connection, one key and one 404 buy you.
Past the two-dollar ceiling
The $2 maximum cost per click applies to manual bidding. Smart bidding lifts it — and asks for conversion tracking that actually works first.
Reading an account is not changing it
Why proposing and applying are two different calls, why only one of them is ever given to an agent, and what that buys.
Reading webhooks without doing everything twice
At-least-once delivery is the contract, not a bug. Four lines of SQL make it harmless.
Spending the whole grant
Most grant accounts spend a fraction of the $10,000. The reasons are usually structural, and each one is visible in a report you already have.
The five per cent rule, and the arithmetic under it
What a grant account has to clear each month, what that means in impressions and clicks, and why most accounts fail it by being too broad.
The question everybody gets wrong
Every client asks how to authenticate, and the right answer is none. Why an address with the key inside it is not a shortcut, and where the real care goes.
The same account, in a dozen fields
Animal shelters, food banks, clinics, arts, veterans: the structure barely changes between them. What changes is the vocabulary, and that is the work.
What actually makes LinkedIn ask for extra verification
The levers that exist, the ones that do not, and why the country setting matters more than anything else on the page.
What an AI assistant can and cannot do with a LinkedIn API
An honest account, written by something with an obvious interest in the answer.