Influencer Audit: Fake Engagement and Ad Disclosure Check for Instagram and TikTok

Check Instagram and TikTok creators before you pay them. Enter usernames and get one audit row per creator, with the numbers behind every flag. Built for brands, agencies and creator managers vetting influencers.

What you get per creator

• Engagement rate (average likes plus comments on recent posts, divided by followers), placed against the 2026 benchmark for the same platform and follower size: bottom 25%, below median, above median, top 25% or top 10%
• Views per follower: median views on recent videos as a share of followers
• Activity: date of the last post, days since, and posts per month
• Following vs followers: flagged when a creator follows more accounts than follow them back
• Possible undisclosed promotions: posts with a discount code, or another brand's @handle next to a shopping cue, that carry no #ad, #sponsored or paid-partnership label. Each one is linked so you can look.
• Disclosed sponsored posts: posts with a paid-partnership label or #ad
• Comment check (optional): samples comments from the 3 newest posts and counts spam, self-promotion and copy-paste comments, with examples
• Audience risk (low, medium, high), a risk score and a plain-language summary

Where the benchmark comes from

Engagement is compared with the iQfluence 2026 engagement benchmarks (data from September 2026, 30.1 million Instagram and 107.1 million TikTok creators with at least 1,000 followers who posted in the last 30 days). It uses the same formula, so the numbers line up. Creators under 1,000 followers have no benchmark.

Risk score

Signal	Points
Engagement in the bottom 25% for the follower band	40
Follows more accounts than follow back (1,000+ followers)	20
10% or more of sampled comments are spam or self-promotion (20+ comments sampled)	20
3 or more copy-paste comments	10

Low is under 20, medium is 20 to 49, high is 50 and up. Undisclosed promotions and inactivity are reported in the summary but are not part of the audience score.

Example

From a test run on well-known accounts:

• A beauty brand with 56M Instagram followers: engagement 0.08%, bottom 25% for 5M+ accounts (p25 is 0.25%). Medium risk. Very large brand accounts often score low here because many followers are years old, not because they are fake.
• A tech reviewer with 5.3M Instagram followers: engagement 3.95%, top 25%, views at 22% of followers. Low risk.
• A cooking creator with 22M TikTok followers: engagement in the top 10%, but no new post in over 1,000 days. The account is inactive.

How to use it

1. Enter Instagram usernames, TikTok usernames, or both. Handles and profile URLs work too.
2. Optional: set Comments to sample per post to 10 or more to add the comment check.
3. Run. The actor runs Apify's Instagram and TikTok scrapers in your account, then audits the results.

Output

{
  "platform": "instagram",
  "username": "example_creator",
  "followers": 5287636,
  "audience_risk": "low",
  "risk_score": 0,
  "summary": "no warning signs in these posts",
  "engagement_rate_pct": 3.95,
  "benchmark_band": "instagram 5M+",
  "engagement_vs_peers": "top 25%",
  "benchmark": "p25 0.25%, median 0.7%, p75 1.89%, p90 4.39% (iQfluence 2026 engagement benchmarks)",
  "posts_analyzed": 12,
  "views_per_follower_pct": 22.2,
  "comments_per_1k_likes": 9.2,
  "last_post_date": "2026-10-02",
  "posts_per_month": 2.9,
  "disclosed_sponsored_posts": 0,
  "possible_undisclosed_promotions": 0,
  "comments_sampled": 15,
  "spam_comments": 0,
  "copy_paste_comments": 0
}

Send audits to Google Sheets, Airtable or n8n, Make and Zapier

You can audit creators as they come in and keep every result in one place. No code needed.

n8n, Make or Zapier. Use the Apify app (Zapier, Make) or the Apify node (n8n). Common setups:

• A creator applies through a form (Typeform, Google Forms, Airtable). The workflow runs this actor with {"instagramUsernames": ["<their handle>"]} and writes the audit next to their application.
• Your creator shortlist lives in a Google Sheet or Airtable. Re-run the audit monthly on a schedule and add a new row per creator to watch engagement and activity change.
• A Slack or email message when a creator comes back with audience_risk "high" or any possible undisclosed promotions.

Start from "Actor run finished" for this actor and fetch the dataset items to get the rows. Every field is plain text or a number, with no nested objects (example links and comments are joined into one text field), so each one maps straight to a column.

AI agents. This actor also works as a tool for AI assistants through the Apify MCP server, so an agent can audit a creator when you ask it to.

Good to know

• A flag is a reason to look closer, not proof of fake followers or a broken rule.
• Posts younger than 2 days and pinned posts are left out of the engagement rate.
• Creators promoting their own book or product with "link in bio" are not flagged as undisclosed. Photo and video credits (for example "🎥: @name") are ignored.
• Short fan comments like "love it 😍" are normal and are not counted as spam.
• Follower growth history is not available from a single scrape, so the audit does not check for sudden follower jumps.
• Private accounts and missing profiles are listed as "not checked" and are free.

Pricing

You pay per creator audited. The Instagram and TikTok scrapers it runs also charge your account at their usual rates (about $0.003 per Instagram profile and about $0.04 per TikTok creator at 12 videos). Run it with no input to audit a built-in demo sample for free.

Made by KodaBloom LLC. Questions: info@kodabloom.com