Shield Analytics Is Winding Down: What to Do Now?

If you open shieldapp.ai right now, you'll see four words where a product used to be: Shield is winding down.

For a lot of LinkedIn creators, that's a gut punch. Shield was good. It tracked your post performance, your follower growth, and your content patterns going back years, and it did it without the gimmicks. Plenty of solo creators, agencies, and company marketing teams built their whole reporting habit around it.

So this isn't a "competitor is dead, switch to us" post. It's a practical one. Shield is closing, your data has a clock on it now, and you have a few decisions to make this week. Here's how to save what you've got and where to move it.

What's happening with Shield Analytics?

Shield Analytics has posted a wind-down notice on its homepage and says a formal announcement is coming. There's no public end date yet, and no detail on how long account access or data exports will stay available.

That last part is what matters. When a tool winds down, the export window tends to close before the lights go off entirely. So the safe assumption is simple: the data Shield holds for you is available now, and you shouldn't count on it being available next month.

You can read the notice yourself on Shield's site. Then come back, because the next few steps are time-sensitive.

What Shield users stand to lose

Shield's value was never a single dashboard screen. It was the history. The longer you used it, the more it knew about your LinkedIn performance. When the account closes, here's what goes with it:

• Post-performance history. Impressions and engagement-rate trends for every post, week over week.
• Follower-growth curves. The long view of how your audience built up.
• Content analysis. Which formats, topics, and posting days actually worked for you.
• Your benchmarks. Months or years of baseline numbers you measured new posts against.
• Client reporting history. If you ran Shield for an agency, every client's tracked performance.

Native LinkedIn analytics won't fill this gap. LinkedIn only shows you a rolling recent window, and it doesn't let you compare posts side by side or look back across years. Losing Shield without a plan means losing the timeline.

What to look for in a Shield replacement

Switching tools is never fun. But it's also a chance to think about what you want from your next setup. Here's what's worth checking.

Analytics depth, and how far back it goes. Most tools start tracking the day you sign up. That means a brand-new account and a fresh zero on your timeline. The question to ask any replacement: can it load your past, or only your future?

How it collects data. Shield read your performance directly from LinkedIn, which is part of why its numbers felt trustworthy. Some newer tools instead depend on a third-party API, which LinkedIn can restrict or revoke without warning. That's a real risk when you're choosing a tool you want to rely on for years.

Whether it also helps you create. Analytics tell you how your posts did. A tool that also handles writing, formatting, and scheduling lets you act on what the numbers show, without switching apps.

Multiple profiles and company pages. If you used Shield for client work or a company page, your next tool has to handle more than one account without punishing you for it.

A way to import history. This is the one that decides whether migration hurts. A tool that can ingest your existing LinkedIn data means you don't restart from scratch.

If you want a broad shortlist of options, we keep a running roundup of Shield alternatives. But if you want the short version, the rest of this post is it.

How AuthoredUp helps you keep tracking your performance

Shield set a high bar for LinkedIn analytics. It gave creators and teams a clear, reliable read on how their content performed, and a lot of people built genuine habits around it.

AuthoredUp is there to support that same habit. You can keep tracking your LinkedIn performance with advanced metrics, and you can look back at how your past posts did rather than starting your history from zero. For anyone leaving Shield, that continuity is the part that matters most.

AuthoredUp also offers more than analytics. It's a LinkedIn content creation platform too, so the writing, formatting, and scheduling that used to sit in a separate tool can live in the same place as your metrics. Here's how the pieces line up.

Get your full analytics history back

This is the part that should change your mind about migration being painful.

LinkedIn lets every user download a complete archive of their own account data: every post you've ever published, with its performance numbers. AuthoredUp can read that archive and rebuild your analytics from it. Not from the day you signed up. From as far back as your posting history goes.

So moving off Shield doesn't mean a blank timeline. You request your LinkedIn data export, upload it, and your historical posts and metrics populate inside AuthoredUp. If you'd rather not wait on LinkedIn's export queue, the archive import also works as a fast way to bulk-load history in one go.

One thing worth being precise about: this works because LinkedIn itself hands you the data. It's your account, your export, fully within LinkedIn's terms. We wrote up exactly how it works in the help guide on importing your LinkedIn data export.

Advanced metrics and a clear view of past performance

AuthoredUp pulls your performance data the same way Shield did: directly from your LinkedIn feed, through a Chrome extension. There's no third-party API in the middle that LinkedIn could switch off. The tool sees what you see.

The analytics built for LinkedIn creators give you a detailed read on what's working:

• Side-by-side post comparisons, so you can see which hook actually pulled
• Correlation plots that show whether posting more often moves your engagement
• Reaction breakdowns, not just a single engagement total
• A color-coded dashboard that flags trends instead of making you hunt for them

All of it works for personal profiles and company pages. If you want the deeper tour of what the metrics cover, the LinkedIn analytics guide walks through it.

Content creation, alongside your analytics

Shield focused on analytics, and did that job well. AuthoredUp covers the analytics and the creation side too, so acting on what your metrics tell you doesn't mean opening another tool.

Inside LinkedIn's own interface, the editor gives you real formatting (bold, italics, bullets, emoji) plus a library of 200+ hooks and 150+ CTA templates. You can preview a post exactly as it'll appear before publishing, save drafts and organize ideas, schedule posts, and pull up any past post to reuse it.

It all happens next to the numbers, so you can see how a post did and write the next one in the same place.

Built for agencies, companies, and individuals

Shield earned a lot of its loyal users in agencies and marketing teams, not just among solo creators. AuthoredUp is built for all three.

Agencies manage every client's LinkedIn profile from one account, each with its own separate analytics. No juggling logins, no per-client mess.

Companies get full company page support: analytics, scheduling, and content creation all work for pages, and pages are free and unlimited on every plan. You're not charged extra to track the page your whole team posts to.

Individual creators get the same kind of performance tracking they relied on in Shield, plus the creation tools, starting at $19.95 a month with a 14-day free trial.

Nobody in that list is an afterthought. The tool scales from one profile to a full client roster without changing how it works.

What AuthoredUp costs

Shield's last-known price was $25 per month. AuthoredUp is $19.95 per personal profile connected, and that price covers both the analytics and the creation tools. So replacing Shield doesn't cost you more.

Company pages are free and unlimited. The 14-day free trial doesn't ask for a card. Team plans are available for bigger rosters.

The full pricing breakdown has the plan-by-plan detail if you're comparing for a team.

How to migrate from Shield to AuthoredUp in 4 steps

Here's the whole move, start to finish. You can do steps 1 and 2 today.

1. Export your Shield data now. Download your CSVs while your account is still active. Don't wait for the formal shutdown announcement.
2. Start an AuthoredUp free trial. Fourteen days, no credit card. Install the Chrome extension and connect your LinkedIn profile.
3. Request your LinkedIn data archive. In LinkedIn, go to Settings → Data Privacy → Get a copy of your data. LinkedIn takes roughly 24 to 48 hours to prepare the full archive. Start this early, it runs in the background while you do everything else.
4. Import the archive into AuthoredUp. Upload the file when LinkedIn delivers it. Your historical posts and performance data populate, and your timeline picks up where Shield left off.

Four steps, and only one of them involves any real waiting and that one runs on its own.

FAQ

When is Shield Analytics shutting down?

‍Shield has posted a wind-down notice and says a formal announcement is coming, but no official end date is public yet. Treat your data as available now and not guaranteed later, and export it this week.

Will I lose my Shield data?

‍Once Shield closes, the data stored inside its platform won't be retrievable. Exporting Shield's CSV files and importing your LinkedIn data archive into a new tool is how you keep your history.

Does AuthoredUp work for company pages?

‍Yes. Analytics, scheduling, and content creation all work for company pages, and pages are free and unlimited on every AuthoredUp plan.

Can AuthoredUp handle multiple profiles and client accounts?

‍Yes. You can connect and manage multiple LinkedIn profiles from one account, each with its own analytics. That separation is what makes it workable for agencies and teams.

Can I get my old analytics into AuthoredUp?

‍Yes. The LinkedIn archive import loads years of historical post performance, not just data from your signup date forward. It's the main reason migrating off Shield doesn't mean starting over.

Is AuthoredUp safe for my LinkedIn account?

‍Yes. AuthoredUp runs as a Chrome extension and uses no automation, scraping, or anything that breaks LinkedIn's terms. The archive import relies on the data export LinkedIn gives you for your own account. The guide on LinkedIn-compliant data import has the detail.