Free access to the Social Selling Index is gone, and it is not only free accounts. A fully unlocked LinkedIn Premium All-in-One plan shows the same lockout. If your dashboard now reads "You do not have access to SSI", nothing you did caused it, and no successor score for individuals has been announced. The shutdown itself, with dated sightings and the archive trail, is documented in the original investigation. This page answers the question that comes next: what do you track instead? The answer is a fifteen minute monthly audit built on four signals, and after looking at what the old number was actually made of, there is a case that you should not want a replacement score at all.
Can you still see your SSI anywhere?
Not through Premium. LinkedIn's Premium plan comparison does not mention the Social Selling Index on any tier, so upgrading changes nothing. LinkedIn's notice points at Sales Navigator instead, although LinkedIn's own Sales Navigator comparison table has no Social Selling Index row either. The full buying question, what each plan costs and what is verified versus assumed, is in the piece on whether any subscription brings the score back.
The short version for this page: there is nothing to buy that reliably restores the number, so the rest of this article assumes it is gone for good.
Is LinkedIn replacing the SSI with something else?
Nothing has been announced for individuals. LinkedIn's SSI resources now point toward AI features inside Sales Navigator, and the channels where the company normally announces retirements and successors have stayed quiet. If an individual-facing score ships, this page gets an update note as soon as it can be verified. Plan on the assumption that it will not.
Why a replacement score is the wrong goal
Look at what fed the old number before you go shopping for a new one. As the full pillar breakdown shows, LinkedIn graded attendance: how many days you showed up, how many searches you ran, how often your invitations were accepted, how much you posted and reacted. A few inputs reached further, endorsements and the followers your articles earned, but the bulk of the meter moved when you moved. LinkedIn now writes about the score in the past tense on its own Sales Navigator resources page, which says it "allowed LinkedIn users to compare their efforts to competitors and others in their network."
So the failure was not that the number died. The failure was the question it asked. Usage is easy to measure and almost meaningless to a career. The question worth asking has always been harder to score: did anyone's mind change because of you this month? No dashboard hands you that answer. Four observable signals get you close.
The monthly authority audit: four signals, fifteen minutes
This framework comes from ten years of running corporate social media, including the executive LinkedIn program at QIAGEN that passed 3.5 million impressions. No composite score ever showed whether that work was landing. Checks like these did. Run them once a month, write four numbers in a note and watch the trend, not the level.
1. Reply quality. Open your last ten posts and list the job titles of the people who commented. Now put that list next to the three roles you most need to reach: the buyer, the hiring manager, the editor, whoever pays off your goal. Count the overlaps. Ten warm comments from peers are pleasant and worth almost nothing strategically. A single reply from a target role is the event you are publishing for. What good looks like: at least one target-role interaction per posting month. Red flag: your comment section is entirely other creators.
2. Private spread. Public reactions are the cheapest currency on the platform. The expensive currency is a person deciding a specific colleague needs your post: a repost with their own commentary, or a direct message that mentions something you published. Count those events for the month. What good looks like: any. They are rare and they mean more than a hundred reactions. Red flag: high reaction counts with zero private spread, which usually means you are producing scroll candy.
3. Quoted inbound. Each time a conversation starts in your inbox, note whether the opener references something you wrote, and which piece. This is the closest observable thing to an authority score, because it means your content did the selling before you entered the room. Track it quarterly and watch which topics generate it, because that tells you what to write more of. Red flag: months of publishing with inbound that never mentions your content, which means the content is consumed but not attributed, or not consumed.
4. Profile and posts telling one story. Open your profile in a private browser window, read the top card, then read your three latest posts in a row. Ask the only question a stranger asks: do these describe the same person? Sharp posts on top of a profile written for a different job is the most common mismatch there is, and it quietly kills conversions, which is how people end up with views that never turn into messages. What good looks like: a stranger could guess your positioning from either half alone and get the same answer.
Why monthly and not daily: these numbers are small on purpose. Daily checking turns them into another meter to feed, which is the exact habit the SSI trained and the exact habit worth breaking. Publish about twice a month with something you stand behind, defend the first hour after each post and let the audit tell you quarterly whether the strategy is working.
What LinkedIn still gives you for free
Your own analytics survived the SSI. LinkedIn still shows you how each post performed and still counts your profile views, with the usual free-tier limits on who exactly viewed you. What the free viewer data does and does not include is covered separately in the piece on profile views. One caution earned the hard way: feature boundaries on LinkedIn move without notice, as the SSI just demonstrated, so treat any page describing what is free as a snapshot and check your own account.
Your posting time is also still your own data. The generic best-time charts were never worth much, and your own audience tells you when it shows up.
Where LinkedScore fits, honestly
The four signals above are free and manual, and the one thing they cannot do is read your profile the way a stranger reads it, because you already know what you meant. That is the gap LinkedScore fills. It analyzes your profile and what you share with it, then returns a score and a concrete plan. Free, no card and you see a preview of your result before the email step that unlocks the full report. It is not an SSI clone: the LinkedIn Score is computed from your profile rather than your SSI, there is no activity meter inside it and nothing in it rewards being louder. If you still have your four pillar numbers from a Sales Navigator seat it will read those too, but it does not need them.
And if you would rather walk through the result with Ali, you can book a session.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free replacement for the LinkedIn SSI?
LinkedIn has not shipped one and has announced none. What remains free is LinkedIn's own post and profile analytics, the four manual signals above and third-party analyzers, including this one. Nothing free recreates the old 0 to 100 number, and given what that number measured, nothing should.
Will LinkedIn Premium bring my SSI back?
No. LinkedIn's Premium plan comparison does not mention the Social Selling Index, Sales Navigator or social selling on any tier, and a fully unlocked Premium All-in-One account still shows the lockout message. The evidence is in the piece on Premium and SSI access.
Can Sales Navigator users still see their SSI?
That is the direction of LinkedIn's own wording, which calls SSI a Sales Navigator feature. LinkedScore holds no Sales Navigator license, so it is untested here. Polish LinkedIn and Sales Navigator trainer Rafał Szymański, who has held a license since the 2015 beta, reported on September 7, 2026 that he still sees his score. A grandfathered seat is not proof that a new purchase restores it, so verify before you buy.
Will my SSI score come back?
There is no indication it will. No announcement, no date and no successor for individuals has been published. If that changes, this page gets an update note as soon as it can be verified.
Does losing the SSI hurt my reach?
No LinkedIn page, live or archived, describes the SSI as an input to feed distribution, search ranking or recruiter search, and those sources are walked through in the shutdown investigation. A number nobody else could see is gone. Your reach did not depend on it.
How do I measure my LinkedIn presence without the SSI?
Run the monthly audit above: whether target roles reply to your posts, whether posts spread privately rather than just collecting likes, whether inbound messages quote your content and whether your profile matches what you post. Four numbers, fifteen minutes, all free.