Threads Creator Finder — Find Influencers by Topic

Give it a topic. Get back the Threads (Meta) creators actually talking about it, with follower counts, bios, bio links — and how each one really performs on that topic.

No login. No cookies. No account of yours is ever used.

---

What makes this different

Most influencer tools rank creators by follower count. That tells you who is big. It does not tell you who is relevant.

This Actor ranks by engagement earned on your topic. Every record includes:

Field	Why it matters
likes_on_topic	How much the audience actually responded when this creator posted about your topic
posts_on_topic	Whether this is a recurring theme for them or a one-off
replies_on_topic	Whether their topic posts start conversations
latest_post_url	Read the post yourself before you reach out

A creator with 600 followers and 2,100 likes on your topic is often a better partner than one with 500,000 followers and 12. This Actor shows you both numbers so you can tell the difference.

Built on deep search

Threads exposes five separate public search surfaces (default, recent, top, users, tags), each capped by Meta at ~20 results but each returning a different set. Tools that query only the default surface see roughly a third of what is there.

This Actor queries all five and merges them, then aggregates the authors. Measured: a single topic yields ~50 posts from ~39 distinct creators, against ~20 posts from a single surface.

This is not a bypass — every surface is the same public endpoint the Threads website itself uses, read logged-out.

Filters that save you money

Filter	Effect
minFollowers	Skip creators below a follower threshold
maxFollowers	Skip creators above one — pair with minFollowers to isolate a band
requireBioLink	Keep only creators with an external link in their bio — usually the ones open to business contact
maxCreatorsPerTopic	Cap per topic, ranked by topic engagement
enrichProfiles: false	Skip profile enrichment for a much faster, cheaper run

Filtered-out creators are never pushed and never billed. Creators appearing under several topics are deduplicated and billed once.

---

Why residential proxy is the default

Meta serves empty shell pages to datacenter IPs. When that happens this Actor falls back to full browser rendering, which still returns correct data but is dramatically slower and more expensive.

Measured on the Apify platform, same target, same day (2026-08-19):

Proxy	Mode used	Time per profile	Compute cost per run
Datacenter (Apify default)	browser rendering	150 s	$0.127
Residential	direct fetch	3.3 s	$0.0086

That is 45x faster and 15x cheaper, for a residential transfer cost of roughly 7% of what the returned records are worth. So RESIDENTIAL ships as the default proxy group.

You can override it, but if you switch to datacenter expect slow runs — the Actor will still work, it just has to render every page.

---

Input

{
  "topics": ["ai agents", "sustainable fashion"],
  "maxCreatorsPerTopic": 40,
  "minFollowers": 1000,
  "maxFollowers": 20000,
  "requireBioLink": true,
  "enrichProfiles": true,
  "maxItems": 1000
}

Field	Type	Notes
topics	array	Topics to find creators for. Each is searched across all five public search surfaces.
maxCreatorsPerTopic	integer	Default 10. Creators per topic, ranked by engagement earned on that topic.
minFollowers	integer	Default 0. Skip creators below this follower count. Filtered-out creators are never billed.
maxFollowers	integer	No upper limit by default. Skip creators above this count. Set both to target a band — 1000–20000 isolates micro-influencers. Creators whose follower count could not be read are kept, not silently dropped.
requireBioLink	boolean	Default false. Keep only creators with an external link in their bio — usually those open to business contact.
enrichProfiles	boolean	Default true. Fetch each creator's profile for follower count, bio and bio link. Set false for a much faster, cheaper run that returns topic-activity data only.
maxItems	integer	Hard cap on billed records. Your safety net.
proxyConfiguration	object	Defaults to RESIDENTIAL. See the section above — datacenter IPs get shell pages from Meta and force slow rendering.

Output

One record per creator:

{
  "username": "alexandro_ai",
  "profile_url": "https://www.threads.com/@alexandro_ai",
  "full_name": "Alexandro",
  "is_verified": false,
  "follower_count": 8104,
  "biography": "Testing and showing how AI can…",
  "external_url": "https://example.com",
  "topic": "ai agents",
  "posts_on_topic": 1,
  "likes_on_topic": 801,
  "replies_on_topic": 12,
  "latest_post_url": "https://www.threads.com/@alexandro_ai/post/XXXX",
  "latest_post_at": "2026-08-14T09:12:00.000Z",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-15T08:40:00.000Z"
}

Every run also writes a RUN_SUMMARY with topics, creatorsDelivered, failedTopics and failureRate, so you can audit reliability yourself.

Honest limitations

• Meta caps each public search surface at ~20 results. Merging all five gives ~50 posts per topic, which is where the ~39 creators come from. This finds the creators currently visible on a topic, not an exhaustive historical index. Anything promising a complete creator database without an account is not telling you the truth.
• follower_count comes from the public profile page. A small number of profiles do not expose it; those records carry null rather than a guess.
• No email addresses. Threads does not publish them, and we do not invent or infer contact details.

What it's used for

• Influencer marketing and partnership scouting — find topic-relevant Threads influencers, not just accounts with big follower counts
• Micro-influencer sourcing — the minFollowers / maxFollowers window is there precisely so you can isolate micro influencers, who often out-convert large accounts on a niche topic
• Brand ambassador discovery — surface people already posting about your product, unpaid, before you approach anyone
• UGC creator search — find Threads UGC creators making real content in your category
• Niche community mapping — see who actually drives a conversation in a small community
• Audience research — read a topic's active voices before you plan a campaign
• Competitive monitoring — track who is posting about a competitor
• AI agents & RAG — clean JSON in, no HTML parsing

Why "by topic" is the whole point

A creator with 200,000 followers who mentioned your category once is worth less to you than a creator with 4,000 followers whose posts on that exact topic earn hundreds of likes. This Actor ranks by engagement earned on your topic, not by follower count, which is why it is useful for micro influencer and brand ambassador work where relevance beats reach.

The official Threads API cannot do this at any permission level — its insights cover your own posts only, and there is no endpoint for another account's profile feed. Creator discovery is one of the few things that genuinely requires reading public pages. See the API-vs-scraping comparison.

Pricing

Pay per creator delivered. Filtered-out and duplicate creators are never billed. maxItems caps your spend.

Related

• Threads Scraper — Posts, Profiles, Replies & Search
• Threads Search Scraper — Keyword Search to JSON

The numbers behind this page

Everything this Actor claims about Threads' logged-out ceilings — the ~20 reply cap, the five search surfaces, the four profile tabs, and the empty shell page Meta serves to datacenter IPs as a valid HTTP 200 — is written up with the measurements, dates and method here:

What Threads actually returns when you are not logged in

It is a reference, not a sales page. If you are evaluating any Threads scraper, including someone else's, those are the limits to test them against.

---

Open-source client

There is a small MIT-licensed JavaScript client for this Actor, so you do not have to write the run-start / polling / dataset-pagination plumbing yourself:

github.com/zhanghengrui0308/threads-data-client — zero dependencies, Node 18+.

import { ThreadsClient } from 'threads-data-client';

const threads = new ThreadsClient(process.env.APIFY_TOKEN);

const creators = await threads.findCreators(['sustainable fashion'], { maxItems: 100 });

It also exposes estimateCost(actor, records, tier), which tells you the exact USD bill for a run before you start it, at your own plan tier.

You do not need it — the Actor works fine from the Apify Console, the API, or any HTTP client. It is there if you would rather read the code than trust a description of it.

---

Legal & scope

Reads public Threads pages only. No login, no cookies, no CAPTCHA solving, no access-control circumvention. On robots.txt, stated plainly: threads.com/robots.txt runs an allowlist. Named crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot and others) are granted specific access; for every other user agent the file says Disallow: /, and its opening notice states that automated collection requires express written permission from Meta. This Actor is not on that allowlist. We say so because you should decide with the real facts rather than a comfortable summary, and because you are the party accountable for how the data is collected and used under Meta's terms and applicable law. Creator profiles are personal data — you are responsible for GDPR/CCPA compliance in how you use and store them.