Facebook Groups Search: Groups That Allow Promotion

Find Facebook groups (public and private) by keyword and location and get one row per group:

• exact member count;
• posts in the last day and month and an activity level;
• privacy, location, rules and creation date;
• whether the group's rules allow self-promotion, read by an AI model;
• websites and emails the group published itself.

No Facebook account, no cookies.

Use it to find where your customers talk and where you are allowed to post: real estate investors in Texas, dog owners in London, Shopify sellers, yoga teachers in Kyiv. Turn on Monitor mode and a scheduled task sends you only the groups you have not received before.

What you get

name	membersCount	postsLastMonth	activityLevel	promotionPolicy	privacy	locations
Texas Real Estate Investors Network (TREIN)	31355	2304	very_active	restricted	Public	Dallas, Texas
Shopify App Founders	5033	32	active	restricted	Private
Shopify Australia	12066	104	active	forbidden	Private	Australia
Kyiv Yoga Teachers Club	494	0	dead	forbidden	Private	Kyiv, Ukraine

The numbers are from our test runs in October 2026 and change over time.

{
  "groupId": "279017812501607",
  "name": "South London Acro Yoga",
  "url": "https://www.facebook.com/groups/southlondonacro/",
  "membersCount": 1536,
  "privacy": "Public",
  "visibility": "Visible",
  "postsLastDay": 0,
  "postsLastMonth": 5,
  "activityLevel": "low",
  "postsPer1kMembers": 3.3,
  "promotionPolicy": "restricted",
  "promotionRules": [
    "No unrelated promotions or spam"
  ],
  "createdAt": "2017-01-08",
  "history": "Group created on January 8, 2017. Name last changed on July 30, 2017.",
  "locations": [],
  "adminsCount": 5,
  "hasMembershipQuestions": false,
  "imageUrl": "https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/...",
  "rules": [
    {
      "title": "No unrelated promotions or spam",
      "description": "Give more to this group than you take. Self-promotion, spam and irrelevant links aren't allowed. Any promotion just relate directly to acro in South London."
    }
  ],
  "websites": [
    "https://www.southlondonacro.co.uk"
  ],
  "emails": [],
  "facebookLinks": [],
  "query": "yoga London",
  "keyword": "yoga",
  "searchLocation": "London",
  "foundBy": "yahoo",
  "status": "ok"
}

Every row has a status:

• ok: a group, charged;
• not_found: a group link that is deleted or not visible without login;
• error: the page did not open;
• duplicate: two links to the same group;
• skipped: your limit was reached.

Only ok rows are charged.

In our test runs of 106 groups, every row had the exact member count, posts per month and creation date. Of those, 98 had a description, 77 a location and 58 rules.

How to search Facebook groups by keyword

1. Put one or more Search keywords, for example real estate investors texas.
2. Optionally set filters:
   • Min members and Max members;
   • Privacy;
   • Min posts in the last month;
   • Location contains;
   • Promotion rules.
3. Run. Results are in the dataset (table, JSON, CSV, Excel) or through the API.

To enrich groups you already have, put their links in Group URLs. Both /groups/<name or id>/ links and /share/g/<code>/ share links work. Groups you list yourself are always returned: the filters apply only to groups found by keywords.

Keyword match. By default a group is kept only if every word of the keyword is in its name or search description. So dog training london does not return general London neighbourhood groups, and real estate investors texas does not return a group named "Houston Real Estate Investors". Switch to Any word or Off for a wider list.

Search Facebook groups by location

Put cities, regions or countries in Search locations. Every keyword is searched with every location: yoga with London and Manchester runs yoga London and yoga Manchester. Each row says which keyword and searchLocation found it.

Location contains is a different thing. It keeps only groups whose own Facebook location matches your text. Many groups set no location, so this filter is stricter.

Find Facebook groups that allow self-promotion

An AI model reads each group's rules and sets promotionPolicy:

value	meaning
allowed	the rules allow members to promote their business openly
restricted	promotion is allowed with a condition: a promo thread or day, admin approval, "within reason", only on-topic offers
listings_only	a deals or buy-and-sell group: you may post your own listings (for example properties), not promote a business
forbidden	the rules ban self-promotion, ads or selling, or allow them only for admins or as paid sponsorship
not_mentioned	the group has rules, but none is about promotion
no_rules	no rules were found on the group's About page
unknown	the rules could not be read this time

promotionCondition says the condition in a few words, for example "only in the Friday promo thread" or "only off-market property listings". promotionRules lists the titles of the rules behind the decision, so you can check them in rules.

Promotion rules filter:

• Allowed keeps allowed and restricted.
• Allowed or listings also keeps listings_only.
• Not forbidden drops only the explicit bans.

To read the rules, the Actor has to open every group page. In our tests about one group in eight allowed promotion. So a group that passed your other filters and was skipped by this one is charged as a screening at $0.002. Groups skipped by the other filters are free, and so are groups whose rules could not be read (unknown).

What to expect: of 160 groups from our test runs, 85 had rules. The model marked:

• 20 as allowing promotion with conditions;
• 10 as listings only;
• 44 as banning promotion;
• 11 as not mentioning it.

Rules in any language are read: we tested English, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish and Vietnamese.

How reliable it is: we tried 158 tricky ban wordings collected while testing the Actor, such as "No ads - all posts need admin approval", "La publicité n'est pas autorisée" and "Promotions are allowed for group admins only". The model read none of them as permission. Of 45 real conditions, it read 3 as bans. It is still a reading of the rules, not a promise from the admins: read the rules in promotionRules before you post.

How to find active Facebook groups

• activityLevel comes from posts in the last month:
  • dead: 0;
  • low: 1 to 29;
  • active: 30 to 299;
  • very_active: 300 or more.
• postsPer1kMembers is posts per month per 1,000 members. A group with 100,000 members and 50 posts a month has a big number on the door but a quiet feed.
• Use Min posts in the last month to skip quiet groups for free.

Contacts the group published

websites, emails and facebookLinks are taken from the group's own description and rules: the community's site, a WhatsApp or Telegram link, the organiser's page. The Actor makes no extra requests for them and never looks up admins or members. In our test runs, 12% of groups published a website and 6% an email. Turn off Include contacts if you do not need them.

Monitor new Facebook groups

Set Mode to Monitor and save the input as a task with a schedule (daily or weekly). Each run returns only groups that this monitor has not returned before (changeType: new). Good to know:

• "New" means new to you, not newly created. Monitor reads the top search results for each keyword, so a group appears once search engines rank it there.
• If you relax your filters later (for example lower Min members), groups skipped earlier are returned as new.
• Re-check known groups also opens groups returned earlier. It returns the ones whose member count or privacy changed (changeType: changed, previousMembersCount, membersChange). Groups from Group URLs are always re-checked in Monitor mode.
• Webhook URL receives a POST with newGroups and changedGroups after a run with changes.
• Telegram bot token and Telegram chat ID send a short summary to your chat: members, posts a month and the promotion policy of each new group.

Each saved task keeps its own memory. Without a task, the memory is kept per set of keywords, locations and URLs, or under your own Monitor ID.

How much does it cost to find Facebook groups?

Pay per result, proxies included:

Event	Price
Group returned (a row with status: ok)	$0.00299 ($2.99 per 1,000 groups)
Group re-checked in Monitor mode that returned no row	$0.0015
Group opened and skipped by the Promotion rules filter (only when that filter is on)	$0.002
Run start	$0.005 per run (one event per GB of memory; the default 512 MB is one event)

Not charged: groups removed by your other filters (members, privacy, activity, location, keyword), deleted groups, duplicates and failed pages.

Set Max groups in total for a hard cap on returned groups. The Actor also stops before your maximum cost per run. If your filters remove almost every group, the Actor stops early instead of opening hundreds of pages.

With the Promotion rules filter on, a returned group costs much more in total, because several groups are screened for each one that allows promotion. In our test, "shopify sellers" and "dog training london" gave 6 groups for $0.097:

• $0.005 for the start;
• $0.018 for the 6 groups;
• $0.074 for 37 screenings.

If you want the whole list anyway, leave the filter off. Every row has promotionPolicy, so you can sort and filter the dataset yourself at $0.00299 per group.

To keep a keyword with no such groups from eating your budget, the Actor stops screening a keyword after about 20 groups plus 10 for every group it returns. Pages already loading finish, so it can be up to 10 more. Max groups in total counts returned groups only, so with this filter use your maximum cost per run as the hard cap.

Example without the Promotion rules filter: 100 groups cost $0.304 ($0.299 for the groups plus $0.005 for the start).

Use it with n8n, Make, Zapier or the API

Run the Actor from the Apify API, the JavaScript and Python clients, or the Apify integrations for n8n, Make and Zapier, and get the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel. In Monitor mode the webhook sends new groups to your own endpoint after each scheduled run.

Search Facebook groups without an account: good to know

• Facebook's own group search works only for logged-in users. This Actor finds groups through public web search (DuckDuckGo and Yahoo), the way a person without an account would. So it returns groups that search engines have indexed. Very new or hidden groups may be missing.
• For each keyword the Actor reads up to 10 DuckDuckGo and 20 Yahoo result pages. How many groups a keyword gives depends on what search engines have indexed and changes from run to run.
  • Our latest test with Keyword match All words and up to 100 per keyword: "real estate investors texas" gave 67 groups, "shopify sellers" 45.
  • Earlier runs that read only 10 Yahoo pages: "yoga kyiv" gave 7-10, "dog training london" 5-7.
  • Any word gives more, but less precise.
• Speed: 70-112 groups took 1-2 minutes in our tests.
• Private groups come with their About information: members, activity, rules. Their posts are not visible without joining and are not collected.
• adminsCount is null when Facebook does not show it without login, which is the case for most private groups.
• The Actor reads only group About pages. It does not collect posts or member lists.
• If a run fails or times out, Apify sends the run record to the developer. The record has no input and no results. It is used only to find and fix the cause.

FAQ

Is it legal? The Actor reads public group information that Facebook shows to anyone without logging in. Facebook's terms restrict automated collection, and GDPR applies if you store personal data. Emails and links in descriptions and rules are published by group admins and may belong to a person. You are responsible for how you use the data.

Why are some member counts rounded? Facebook shows the exact number on the About page for almost every group (membersCountExact: true). When only a rounded value like "6.4K" is available, membersCountExact is false.

Why did a keyword return fewer groups than I asked for? Search engines had no more groups matching all words of the keyword within the result pages the Actor reads, or your filters removed them. The run status shows how many were filtered out. Try Any word or a broader keyword.

Can I trust promotionPolicy blindly? No. It is a reading of the rule text and saves you from opening hundreds of groups. Before posting, read the rules listed in promotionRules. Admins can also change rules at any time.

This Actor is not affiliated with Meta or Facebook.