Instagram Ad Load & Creator Momentum Analyzer

Before you pay a creator, know two things nobody's media kit will tell you: how much of their feed is already ads, and whether their audience is heating up or cooling off.

Give this actor a list of Instagram usernames and get one structured row per creator:

• Ad Load — what share of their recent posts are disclosed sponsorships: explicit caption disclosures (#ad, #sponsored, "paid partnership with", international variants like #werbung/#publicidad) plus collab posts co-authored with a verified business account. Includes the engagement gap between sponsored and organic posts — a creator whose #ad posts pull 0.4× their organic engagement is a very different buy than one with no gap.
• Momentum — is per-post engagement trending up or down across their recent posting window? Labelled rising / steady / cooling with the %-per-week trend, so you can find creators on the way up before their rates follow.
• TrueReach — the median number of real interactions (likes + comments) a post actually gets, and what that is per follower. A floor on genuine reach that follower count can't fake.
• Cadence — posts per week over the analyzed window.
• Superfan Ratio & Creator Responsiveness (experimental, opt-in) — if Instagram exposes public comment samples for the profile, the share of commenters who show up on multiple posts and how often the creator replies. In our live testing Instagram rarely exposes these samples without login, so these fields usually report unavailable — they are opt-in (includeCommentSignals) and never guessed.

Built for brand and agency vetting workflows, influencer marketplaces, and AI agents doing creator due diligence.

Input

{
    "usernames": ["natgeo", "https://www.instagram.com/instagram/"],
    "maxPostsPerProfile": 12
}

Usernames, @handles, or profile URLs all work. Runs with an empty input analyze a demo profile so you can see the output shape.

Output rows (rowType)

• creator-metrics — one per public profile: adLoadPct, adLoadLabel (light / moderate / heavy), sponsoredCount, brandCollabCount (posts co-authored with a verified business account), softCommercialCount (promo-code/affiliate language counted separately, never in the headline ad load), sponsoredEngagementRatio (sponsored avg engagement ÷ organic avg; below 1.0 means sponsored posts underperform), sponsoredPosts (URLs + which disclosure marker matched), momentumLabel, momentumPctPerWeek, momentumRecentVsOlder, trueReachMedianInteractions, trueReachPerFollowerPct, avgEngagementRate, postsPerWeek, superfanRatioPct, creatorReplySharePct, plus profile basics (followers, bio, external URL, verified).
• notice — invalid input, private account, or unreachable profile, with a plain-language explanation. Notice rows are never charged.

A machine-readable SUMMARY record (counts + failures) is written to the run's key-value store.

Honest limits — read before you rely on it

• Instagram exposes at most 12 recent posts without login. All metrics are computed over that window (typically 2–8 weeks for active creators). They describe recent behavior, not account history.
• Momentum is engagement momentum, not follower growth. A single snapshot cannot observe follower change over time.
• Ad Load counts caption disclosures and verified business collabs only — treat it as a floor. Instagram's official "Paid partnership with…" header label is NOT exposed to anonymous clients anywhere (we verified this across the profile API, post pages, and embed pages — no login-free scraper can see it, whatever it claims). A creator who discloses only via that label and never in captions will read lower than reality; undisclosed ads are invisible to everyone.
• Collab posts count toward ad load only when a co-author is a business account (verified by profile lookup). Co-authored posts with other creators are not treated as sponsorships, and unverifiable co-authors are never counted.
• Superfan and responsiveness metrics depend on Instagram exposing public comment samples, which it currently rarely does without login. Expect unavailable for these two fields on most profiles; when fewer than 10 comments are sampled they also report unavailable rather than a made-up number. All other metrics are unaffected.
• Instagram only — TikTok/YouTube captions and comments are not exposed the same way, and this actor does not pretend otherwise.
• Private and not-found accounts return notice rows (uncharged), not errors.

Integrations

curl (synchronous run, returns the dataset):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/apricot_blackberry~instagram-ad-load-analyzer/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"usernames": ["natgeo"]}'

JavaScript (apify-client):

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor('apricot_blackberry/instagram-ad-load-analyzer').call({ usernames: ['natgeo'] });
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Python (apify-client):

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])
run = client.actor("apricot_blackberry/instagram-ad-load-analyzer").call(run_input={"usernames": ["natgeo"]})
items = client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).list_items().items

MCP (Claude Desktop / any MCP client):

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "command": "npx",
            "args": ["-y", "@apify/actors-mcp-server", "--actors", "apricot_blackberry/instagram-ad-load-analyzer"],
            "env": { "APIFY_TOKEN": "your-token" }
        }
    }
}

No-code: works out of the box in Zapier, Make, and n8n via the Apify app (Run Actor → Fetch Dataset Items), or point a webhook at the run's dataset.

Pricing

Pay per event: a small run-start fee plus a per-profile fee for each creator actually analyzed. Notice rows, private accounts, and failures are never charged.