Your LinkedIn photo is a thumbnail 90% of the time. Recruiters decide in seconds whether your profile looks worth clicking, and the photo does an unfair share of that work. The good news: you no longer need a $300 studio session to get it right. The confusing news: there are now dozens of AI headshot tools, and they are not the same.

I'm a solo founder and I built one of them — Hey AI Headshot — so take my opinions with the appropriate grain of salt. But I've also spent a year staring at what makes these tools succeed or fail, and the buying criteria are simpler than the marketing suggests. Here's what actually matters before you pay anyone.

1. Likeness: does it look like you?

This is the whole game. A beautiful headshot of a stranger is worthless on your LinkedIn.

The honest truth: output quality depends more on your input photo than on which tool you pick.…