Everything you need to understand the rules, the scoring, and the strategy behind LinkedIn's daily category-guessing puzzle.
LinkedIn Pinpoint is a daily puzzle with one core task: identify a hidden category from a series of clue words. When the puzzle loads, you see a single word. That word belongs to some category — "types of pasta," "Greek letters," "things found in an office," anything — and your job is to name that category.
You type your guess. If you are right, the puzzle is solved and your score depends on how few clues you needed. If you are wrong, a second clue word is revealed and added to the first. You keep guessing, with a new clue appearing after each miss, until you either name the category correctly or run out of clues. There are five clues in total, so you have five attempts at most.
Pinpoint rewards speed of recognition. Solving the puzzle on the first clue is the best possible result — you identified the category from a single, deliberately broad word. Each additional clue you need lowers your result for the day. Solving on clue five still counts as a win, but it is the lowest-scoring win. Failing to solve at all after five clues ends your day without a win and resets your solving streak.
This scoring structure creates the central tension of the game. The first clue is your highest-value guess, but it is also the riskiest because the clue is broad enough to belong to many categories. Good players develop a feel for when a first-clue guess is worth the risk and when it is smarter to spend a clue gathering information.
The five clues are not random — they are ordered. Clue one is the broadest and most ambiguous. Each subsequent clue is chosen to narrow the field of possible categories. By clue five, the set of words should point unambiguously to a single category for anyone thinking carefully.
A useful way to think about it: clue one opens up dozens of possibilities, clue two cuts that down to a handful, clue three usually settles it for sharp players, and clues four and five exist as a safety net for harder puzzles. If you find yourself at clue four or five regularly, that is normal — the puzzles vary a lot in difficulty.
LinkedIn Pinpoint Answers Today publishes the complete set of clues and the confirmed answer for every day's Pinpoint puzzle. If you are stuck on a particular clue, you can look up the next one here instead of burning a guess. If you missed a day entirely, the puzzle is gone from the official LinkedIn app — but it lives on in our archive, organised by puzzle number and date.
We publish each day's guide at 8:00 AM London time. Before that, the page shows a countdown; after, the full clues and answer are available.
LinkedIn Pinpoint is a free daily word-association game published by the LinkedIn News team as part of the LinkedIn News Games collection. The premise is deceptively simple: you are shown a single word, and you have to work out the hidden category that word belongs to. Guess correctly and you win. Guess wrong and a second clue word appears, then a third, and so on, up to five clues total. The earlier you identify the category, the better your score.
What makes Pinpoint genuinely tricky is that the first clue is almost always broad enough to belong to dozens of possible categories. The word "Mercury," for instance, could point to planets, chemical elements, Roman gods, car brands, or even Freddie Mercury. Only as more clues arrive does the real category come into focus. The skill lies in resisting the urge to lock in a guess too early — while also recognising that waiting for clue five costs you points.
Pinpoint resets once every 24 hours. A brand-new puzzle replaces the old one, and there is no official way to replay past puzzles inside the LinkedIn app. That daily-only format is exactly why answer guides like this one exist: if you miss a day, or you get stuck and don't want to waste your remaining guesses, you can look up the clues and the solution here instead.
This site publishes the full set of five clues and the confirmed answer for every single day's puzzle, plus a complete archive going back through previous puzzles. Everything is organised by puzzle number and date so you can find any specific day in seconds.
When the first word appears, do not try to name the category yet. Instead, spend a few seconds listing every category that word could plausibly belong to. If the word is "Saturn," your mental list might be: planets, Roman gods, car models, NASA rockets, Sega consoles. Holding several possibilities open at once is what lets you converge quickly when clue two narrows the field. Players who guess on clue one and miss have effectively thrown away their best scoring opportunity for nothing.
The second clue is where most solvable puzzles crack open. Take your list of candidate categories from clue one and ask which of them also contains clue two. If clue one was "Saturn" and clue two is "Mars," the intersection of "planets" and "Roman gods" is still alive, but "car models" and "Sega consoles" are mostly dead. One more clue usually settles it. The habit to build is intersection-thinking: you are not looking for a category that fits the newest clue, you are looking for the category that fits every clue you have seen so far.
Not every Pinpoint category is a tidy semantic group like "fruits" or "European capitals." A meaningful share of puzzles use structural categories — words that all contain a hidden smaller word, words that all rhyme, words that are all anagrams of something, or words that all start or end with the same letters. If the clues seem completely unrelated in meaning, stop looking for a meaning-based link and start looking at the letters themselves. "Carpet," "target," and "forget" share nothing thematically, but they all end in "-et" and contain other words.
If you have reached the fifth and final clue, the puzzle is no longer testing your speed — it is testing whether you can solve it at all. Clue five is typically the most specific, most narrowing word in the set. By this point you should be able to eliminate every category except one. If you still can't see it, re-read all five clues in order and say them out loud; hearing them often surfaces a pattern your eyes skipped.
Pinpoint accepts the category in a fairly forgiving range of phrasings, but you still want to aim for the level the puzzle is built around. "Types of dance" will usually be accepted where "dances" or "dance styles" also work, but an over-specific guess like "Latin ballroom dances" may be rejected if the actual category is broader. When in doubt, guess the simplest, most general phrasing that still captures the link.
The single best long-term improvement is volume. The more Pinpoint puzzles you see, the faster you recognise the editors' favourite category types. That is the real purpose of our answer archive — not just to look up a day you missed, but to scroll through dozens of past puzzles and internalise the rhythm of how clues are built. After a few weeks of this, clue two will start feeling like clue four used to.
After tracking the daily puzzle over a long stretch, the same families of categories show up again and again. Knowing them shortens your guessing time considerably.
A quick refresher on the rules and a few strategies to crack the daily puzzle in fewer guesses.
The puzzle starts with a single word. It belongs to a hidden category — your job is to figure out which.
Type your best guess for the umbrella category. "Things in a kitchen", "World capitals", "Types of dance" — all valid forms.
Wrong guess? A second related word appears. You get up to 5 clue words, each tightening the field.
Lock the category in clue one for a perfect score. Burn all five guesses without solving and the streak resets.
Everything you need to know about the daily LinkedIn Pinpoint puzzle.