Instagram Related Profiles Scraper – Discovery

Discover public accounts Instagram recommends around any username. Instagram Related Profiles Scraper turns seed usernames into structured lists of similar accounts for competitor research, creator discovery, market mapping, and audience exploration.

Enter plain usernames only. The Actor saves every discovered related account as its own dataset row, adds the source profile for context, and records a failed row when a seed cannot produce usable recommendations.

At a glance	Details
📥 Input	One or more plain Instagram usernames
📤 Output	Related profile identity, URL, image, privacy, verification, and source profile
🔐 Login required	No
⚡ Processing	Up to 5 seed profiles concurrently, with automatic retries
💾 Delivery	Structured Apify dataset for JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and API use

What the related Instagram profiles scraper does 🔎

Instagram's recommendations reveal accounts associated with a brand, creator, topic, or public figure. This Actor collects those public related-profile results and makes them usable outside the Instagram interface.

For every seed username, the Actor can return multiple success rows. Each row includes one recommended profile, the seed profile that produced it, and the number of recommendations returned for that seed. This row-per-profile design works naturally in spreadsheets, databases, and enrichment pipelines.

Expected fields include:

• Related account ID, username, name, URL, and profile picture
• Private and verified flags
• Full source-profile context
• Recommendation count for the source username
• Explicit success or failed status

How to find similar Instagram accounts 🚀

1. Add one or more public usernames without @.
2. Start the Actor.
3. Wait for related profiles to be collected.
4. Open the dataset and filter, export, or integrate the rows.

Example input:

{
  "inputList": [
    "nasa",
    "cristiano",
    "nike"
  ]
}

Do not submit full Instagram URLs. Duplicate usernames are collapsed case-insensitively.

Related-profile output fields 📦

Field	Type	Meaning
input	string	Seed username exactly as submitted
status	string	success or failed
type	string or null	Result type, normally profile
profile_picture_url	string or null	Recommended profile's image URL
username	string or null	Recommended profile username
name	string or null	Recommended profile display name
profile_url	string or null	Canonical recommended profile URL
id	string or null	Recommended profile's numeric ID
is_private	boolean or null	Private-account flag
is_verified	boolean or null	Verified-account flag
source_profile	object or null	Profile that generated the recommendation
related_profiles_returned	integer or null	Total related profiles returned for the seed

Complete successful dataset item:

{
  "input": "nasa",
  "status": "success",
  "type": "profile",
  "profile_picture_url": "https://instagram.example/related-profile.jpg",
  "username": "nasahubble",
  "name": "NASA Hubble",
  "profile_url": "https://www.instagram.com/nasahubble/",
  "id": "123456789",
  "is_private": false,
  "is_verified": true,
  "source_profile": {
    "profile_picture_url": "https://instagram.example/source-profile.jpg",
    "username": "nasa",
    "name": "NASA",
    "profile_url": "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/",
    "id": "528817151",
    "is_private": false,
    "is_verified": true
  },
  "related_profiles_returned": 49
}

Complete failed dataset item:

{
  "input": "unavailable_seed_username",
  "status": "failed",
  "type": null,
  "profile_picture_url": null,
  "username": null,
  "name": null,
  "profile_url": null,
  "id": null,
  "is_private": null,
  "is_verified": null,
  "source_profile": null,
  "related_profiles_returned": null
}

Input requirements ⚙️

Parameter	Type	Required	Rules
inputList	array of strings	Yes	At least one plain Instagram username

Accepted: nasa

Rejected: @nasa, https://www.instagram.com/nasa/, blank entries, and invalid username formats.

An invalid item becomes a failed dataset row without stopping other seeds. If the top-level input is absent or malformed, the Actor exits cleanly because it has no valid items to process.

Practical use cases 🎯

Competitor discovery

Start with a known brand and surface neighboring accounts for positioning, content, and market research.

Creator sourcing

Expand from one relevant creator into a broader prospect list, then enrich or qualify the results in later steps.

Social graph exploration

Create source-to-related edges for network maps and recommendation-system research.

Partnership and outreach lists

Export recommended public profiles to a CRM or spreadsheet for manual review before outreach.

Niche research

Compare recommendation sets from several seed profiles to find recurring accounts in a topic or community.

Pricing and result counting 💰

Check the Actor's Pricing tab for the current pricing model and rate. Pricing is controlled by the Store listing and can change independently of this documentation.

Under dataset-item pricing:

• Each discovered related profile is one saved success result.
• A seed with no usable recommendations saves one failed result.
• A seed that returns 49 related profiles creates 49 success rows.
• Network retries do not create extra rows by themselves.
• Duplicate seed usernames are normally processed once.

Because recommendation counts vary by seed and Instagram availability, the final number of rows can be larger than the number of submitted usernames.

Automate similar-account discovery with the API 🔌

Replace $ACTOR_ID with the value shown in the Actor's API tab and $APIFY_TOKEN with your Apify token.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/$ACTOR_ID/runs?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"inputList":["nasa","cristiano"]}'

Run it on a schedule to refresh research lists, trigger webhooks after completion, or connect the dataset to Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, cloud storage, and custom data pipelines.

Reliability and recommendation limits ⚠️

The Actor processes up to five seeds concurrently and automatically retries temporary connection failures, throttling, selected HTTP errors, and blocked responses. Permanent input errors are converted into failed rows instead of crashing a mixed batch.

Related-profile availability is controlled by Instagram. A real public profile may return no recommendations, and recommendation order or membership can change between runs. Some accounts may be private, restricted, renamed, unavailable by region, or temporarily inaccessible.

The Actor does not claim to return an account's followers, following list, or a complete social graph. It returns only the related profiles exposed by the public recommendation source at run time.

A whole run can still fail if the Actor cannot initialize, the Apify dataset is unavailable, or saving a result fails. These infrastructure failures are different from a single failed seed row.

Frequently asked questions ❓

Is this a follower scraper?

No. It collects Instagram's related or recommended public profiles, not the full follower or following list.

Why can one username produce dozens of rows?

Each related account is stored separately. That makes the dataset easy to filter and join without unpacking arrays.

Why did a valid profile return failed?

Instagram may expose an empty or unavailable recommendation response for that seed. A failed row is intentionally saved so the input is not silently lost.

Can I enter profile URLs?

No. Supply plain usernames without @.

Does it require Instagram cookies?

No Instagram login or cookie input is required.

Are the recommendations stable?

No. Recommendations are dynamic and can change because of platform ranking, account state, region, or time.

Support, responsible use, and related actors 🛟

For a reproducible problem, send the Actor support channel a run ID, the approximate run time, and a safe public sample username. Never post access tokens, proxy credentials, or private data.

Use collected data lawfully and responsibly. Review applicable privacy, data-protection, intellectual-property, and platform requirements before storing, combining, or using profile information.