The default LinkedIn connection request is 300 characters. Almost everyone uses it wrong. The way you use it determines whether your account gets quietly throttled, whether your message lands in “Other”, and whether the recipient reads three words and archives.

What follows is what we send ourselves, in our own outreach, on accounts we’d like to keep alive. None of it is a template you can copy verbatim. All of it is a structure.

The structure: three sentences

A connection request that reads like a human wrote it for a specific person tends to share three things, in this order:

One specific reason you are reaching out. Not “your work is inspiring” — something a stranger could not have known about them without looking at their profile.
One bridge sentence that connects what you do to that reason. This is where most people fail by pitching their product instead.
An ask that is smaller than “15 minutes on the calendar”. Either no ask at all, or a single yes/no question.

Why three sentences

LinkedIn’s 300-character limit lets you cram in five. Don’t. Four sentences in a connection request reads as a sales sequence step, and the recipient’s pattern recognition for sales sequence steps is excellent. Three sentences reads as a person.

What “specific” actually means

Things that count as specific:

A talk they gave, by name, at a conference, with one detail.
A specific feature they shipped, with the date or version number.
A position they took publicly (e.g. on a podcast, in a thread) that you have a considered opinion about.
A mutual connection who suggested you reach out, named explicitly.

Things that do not count, despite feeling like they do:

“I see you’re in X industry.”
“Your background at Y company is impressive.”
“We have N mutual connections.” (Everyone reading this has N mutual connections.)
“Loved your post about Z topic” — unless the next sentence says what specifically you loved about it.

The bridge

The bridge is where the request stops being about them and starts being about why you’re writing. It’s also where most people pitch — “we build the X for your Y” — and lose the recipient.

A better bridge names a category, not a product. “We do a lot of cold outreach, mostly to operators like you” tells the recipient where you sit without selling. Compare:

“Marno is a LinkedIn sequencer that helps SDRs hit quota by automating the entire top-of-funnel motion.”

“I build the kind of tool you’d use to run an outreach experiment like that.”

The first reads as a pitch. The second reads as someone who pays attention. Same product.

The ask

A connection request is not a sales call. It’s a request to add a stranger to your professional graph. The right ask is somewhere between “nothing” and “one yes/no question.”

Things that get answered:

“Are you still working on X?”
“Curious whether you’d be open to a 1-line follow-up next month when Y ships.”
(Nothing — just a connection request, with the three sentences as context.)

Things that don’t:

Any calendar link.
“Got 15 minutes this week?”
“Open to a quick chat?”

The line that ruins a good request

“I’d love to learn from your experience” ends more good connection requests than any other sentence. It is universally translated by the recipient as “I’d like 30 minutes of your free time.”

If you genuinely want to learn from someone’s experience, say exactly what you want to learn and bound it. “I’m trying to figure out whether to switch from A to B for X reason — would it be okay if I sent you the 2-sentence version of where I’m stuck?” is the same intent, in a form the recipient can actually agree to.

One more thing about volume

The fastest way to ruin all of the above is to send a hundred of them a day. LinkedIn throttles patterns it considers automated: bursts, late-night sends, repeated identical phrasing, sends to people with no overlap to your network. A good request sent at scale stops being a good request the moment the pattern triggers a soft restriction.

The defaults that real accounts seem to survive are below, in LinkedIn’s daily limits, demystified.