Instagram User Search

🔎 Turn Instagram keywords into profile lists

Built for marketers, researchers, agencies, and creator teams, Instagram User Search Scraper finds public accounts related to your search terms. It returns unique usernames and IDs, the terms behind each match, profile identity, audience counts, business details, and publicly exposed contact data—ready to export or use in another workflow.

• Instagram influencer discovery — find public creators associated with a niche, specialty, or location.
• Instagram lead generation — build prospect lists with available public websites, emails, and phone numbers.
• Instagram creator research — compare biographies, categories, follower counts, and verification status.
• Instagram competitor research — discover public brand and business accounts related to market terms.
• Instagram market research — map accounts surfaced for products, audiences, locations, and specialties.
• Instagram profile data export — create structured profile lists for spreadsheets and downstream analysis.

Explore the corresponding workflow guides for finding niche influencers, building public-contact lead lists, researching creators, studying competitors, mapping a market, and exporting profile data.

📦 What data is returned?

Each dataset row represents one unique Instagram account found for the submitted terms.

Field	Description
userId	Stable Instagram account ID.
username	Instagram username.
fullName	Display name, or null when unavailable.
profilePictureUrl	Public profile-picture URL, or null.
isPrivate, isVerified	Instagram's privacy and verification flags.
matchedKeywords	Every submitted term that led to this account.
biography, websiteUrl	Public biography and external website, when available.
followerCount, followingCount, postCount	Available public profile counts.
isBusinessAccount, category	Available business status and business or creator category.
publicEmail, publicPhone	Contact details explicitly exposed on the public profile or in its biography, when available.

Unavailable optional values are returned as null; they are not guessed. An account found for several terms is saved once with all matching terms in matchedKeywords.

🚀 How to run the Actor

1. Open the Actor's Input tab.
2. Add one or more search terms, such as vegan chef, Montreal photographer, or a brand name.
3. Set the maximum number of unique accounts for the run, or use 0 for all matches available from the search surface.
4. Start the run and open the dataset when it finishes.

No Instagram login, cookies, API key, or other account credentials are required. Results depend on the public profiles available for each query and are not a guaranteed exhaustive directory of Instagram.

🎯 Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
keywords	Array of strings	Required	One or more keywords, niches, people, brands, or businesses. Each term is searched independently.
maxItems	Integer	25	Maximum unique accounts across all terms. Set to 0 for all matches available from the search surface.

{
  "keywords": ["vegan chef", "plant based recipes"],
  "maxItems": 25
}

Profile enrichment is automatic; there is no separate enrichment option or charge.

🧾 Output

{
  "userId": "25025320",
  "username": "natgeo",
  "fullName": "National Geographic",
  "profilePictureUrl": "https://instagram.example/profile-picture.jpg",
  "isPrivate": false,
  "isVerified": true,
  "matchedKeywords": ["travel", "photography"],
  "biography": "Experience the world through the eyes of National Geographic photographers.",
  "websiteUrl": "https://www.nationalgeographic.com/",
  "followerCount": 283000000,
  "followingCount": 150,
  "postCount": 30000,
  "isBusinessAccount": true,
  "category": "Media/news company",
  "publicEmail": null,
  "publicPhone": null
}

Export the default dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, RSS, or HTML, or retrieve it through the Apify API.

💳 Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing. You are charged for each successful unique Instagram account saved to the dataset. A basic account and an account with all available profile details cost the same. Empty searches, failed lookups, duplicate matches, and accounts that are not saved do not create an account charge.

🔌 Integrations

Use the Apify API to start runs programmatically, schedules to repeat searches, webhooks to react to completed runs, and dataset exports or Apify integrations to send profile data downstream.

❓ FAQ

Why did I receive fewer accounts than maxItems?

maxItems is a ceiling, not a promised count. A narrow term may have fewer available public matches, and only accounts with the required identity and status data are saved.

What happens when one term has no matches?

That term produces no rows, but it does not prevent successful matches from your other terms from being returned.

Can the same account appear more than once?

No. Accounts are deduplicated within a run. If one account matches several terms, its single row keeps every matching term in matchedKeywords.

Does every profile include an email or phone number?

No. Contact details appear only when publicly exposed on the profile or in its biography. Missing values remain null.

Can it access private-profile content?

No. The Actor can identify an account marked private, but it does not authenticate to access private content or data Instagram does not expose publicly.

Can it search posts, Reels, hashtags, locations, or follower lists?

No. It searches accounts by text terms. Use a specialized Actor for those adjacent jobs.

Is this a replacement for Instagram's official API?

It is a focused option for keyword-based public account discovery and structured exports without user-provided Instagram credentials. It does not provide private data, outreach, campaign management, historical monitoring, or every official API capability.

🔗 Related actors

• Instagram Profile Scraper ↗ — collect deeper profile and recent-post details for known usernames.
• Instagram Post Scraper ↗ — extract captions, media, and engagement data from account posts.
• Instagram Hashtag Scraper ↗ — collect posts and Reels associated with hashtags.
• Instagram Followers Count Scraper ↗ — monitor follower and following counts for known profiles.
• Instagram Followers Scraper ↗ — collect follower lists from public accounts.

📝 Changelog

• 0.0: Initial release.

🆘 Support

For issues, questions, or feature requests, file a ticket 🫡

Made with ❤️ by Maxime Dupré